Code Readability Management of High-level Programming Languages: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Quality can never be an accident and therefore, software engineers are paying immense attention to produce quality software product. Source code readability is one of those important factors that play a vital role in producing quality software. The code readability is an internal quality attribute that directly affects the future maintenance of the software and re-usability of same code in similar other projects. Literature shows that readability does not just rely on programmer’s ability to write tidy code but it also depends on programming language’s syntax. Syntax is the most visible part of any programming language that directly influence the readability of its code. If readability is a major factor for a given project, the programmers should know about the language that they shall choose to achieve the required level of quality. For this we compare the readability of three most popular high-level programming languages; Java, C#, and C++. We propose a comprehensive framework for readability comparison among these languages. The comparison has been performed on the basis of certain readability parameters that are referenced in the literature. We have also implemented an analysis tool and performed extensive experiments that produced interesting results. Furthermore, to judge the effectiveness of these results, we have performed statistical analysis using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) tool. We have chosen the Spearman’s correlation ad Mann Whitney’s T-test for the same. The results show that among all three languages, Java has the most readable code. Programmers should use Java in the projects that have code readability as a significant quality requirement.