This paper on Communications of the ACM compared several programming languages using data from projects on GitHub:
A Large-Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in GitHub
Their conclusions are quite interesting:
“The data indicates that functional languages are better than procedural languages; it suggests that disallowing implicit type conversion is better than allowing it; that static typing is better than dynamic; and that managed memory usage is better than unmanaged. Further, that the defect proneness of languages in general is not associated with software domains. Additionally, languages are more related to individual bug categories than bugs overall.”
