What is it about?
Community smells are recurring problems in how software teams communicate and collaborate, and they can lead to both social and technical debt. Earlier studies looked at how technical choices, such as the architecture or the introduction of a new language, relate to these problems. In this study, we asked whether using specific programming languages relates to the emergence of community smells. We analyzed the most used programming languages and the community smells in 100 open-source projects on GitHub.
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Why is it important?
We found only a low statistical correlation, and only for a few specific smells: Prima Donna Effects, Solution Defiance, and Organizational Skirmish. This suggests that, at least for some languages, the choice of language is not a good indicator of whether a community has these problems or not.
Perspectives
I have studied community smells from several angles, and here we asked a simple question: does the programming language of a project relate to the social problems of its community? In 100 open-source projects on GitHub, we found only a weak correlation, and only for a few smells. For me, this is a useful result: the choice of a language alone says little about the health of a community.
Prof. Stefano Lambiase
Aalborg Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: An Empirical Study on the Relation Between Programming Languages and the Emergence of Community Smells, August 2024, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
DOI: 10.1109/seaa64295.2024.00049.
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