Comparative analysis of six programming languages based on readability, writability, and reliability

Abstract

In recent years, the development of programming languages has been centered around making them easily understandable and learnable to users. Hence, the readability, writability of languages is being constantly improved while trying to keep the performance reliable. These factors affect how many new users start to use a particular language and how many experienced programmers continue to use it reliably in real applications. Hence, this research has compared the readability, writability, and reliability of six mainstream programming languages, namely C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and R, based on their theoretical characteristics. Furthermore, we conducted a survey determining the choice of a language among programmers and nonprogrammers, which complemented the results gathered from the study. We found that Python outperforms others in terms of its readability and writability, while Java is proven to be the most reliable of all. We reported our findings, insights, and a discussion on the future development of better evaluation metrics.