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International Conference on Social Informatics

SocInfo 2013: Social Informatics pp 391–404Cite as

The Babel of Software Development: Linguistic Diversity in Open Source

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8238))

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) development communities are typically very specialised, on the one hand, and experience high turnover, on the other. Combination of specialization and turnover can cause parts of the system implemented in a certain programming language to become unmaintainable, if knowledge of that language has disappeared together with the retiring developers.

Inspired by measures of linguistic diversity from the study of natural languages, we propose a method to quantify the risk of not having maintainers for code implemented in a certain programming language. To illustrate our approach, we studied risks associated with different languages in Emacs, and found examples of low risk due to high popularity (e.g., C, Emacs Lisp); low risk due to similarity with popular languages (e.g., C++, Java, Python); or high risk due to both low popularity and low similarity with popular languages (e.g., Lex). Our results show that methods from the social sciences can be successfully applied in the study of information systems, and open numerous avenues for future research.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

    Bogdan Vasilescu, Alexander Serebrenik & Mark G. J. van den Brand

Authors
  1. Bogdan Vasilescu
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  2. Alexander Serebrenik
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  3. Mark G. J. van den Brand
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Yoshida-Honmachi, 606-8501, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, Japan

    Adam Jatowt

  2. School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, 80 Stamford Road, 178902, Singapore

    Ee-Peng Lim  & Bing Tian Dai  & 

  3. Department of Information and Library Science, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, 1320 E. 10th St., LI 011, 47405, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Ying Ding

  4. Department of Integrated Psychological Sciences, Kwansei Gakuin University, 1-1-155 Uegahara, 662-8501, Nishinomiya, Hyogo, Japan

    Asako Miura

  5. Faculty of Library, Information and Media Science, University of Tsukuba, 1-2 Kasuga, 305-8550, Tsukuba City, Ibaraki, Japan

    Taro Tezuka

  6. Department of Computer Science, University of Caen Basse-Normandie, Campus Côte de Nacre, F-14032, Caen Cedex, France

    Gaël Dias

  7. Department of Social Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics,, Kyoto University, 606-8501, Kyoto, Japan

    Katsumi Tanaka

  8. Department of Communication, University of California, 93106, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Andrew Flanagin

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© 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Vasilescu, B., Serebrenik, A., van den Brand, M.G.J. (2013). The Babel of Software Development: Linguistic Diversity in Open Source. In: Jatowt, A., et al. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03260-3_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03260-3_34

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-03259-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-03260-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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