Labs: The Best & Worst Programming Languages For Dev Workflow

**Yishai Beeri** (0:00)
It helps me, you know, Bad Mouth Ruby, of course.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:03)
That's always fun.

**Yishai Beeri** (0:04)
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, that's the proof. You were always right, the Python campus. Right, and Ruby's out there, like an unmanageable language.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:11)
Posts in the Python subreddit, they'll love it.

**Yishai Beeri** (0:14)
Posts it in the Ruby subreddit, they'll hate it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:18)
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Yishai, welcome back to Dev Interrupted. It's been great having you running DI Hebrew, which I want to shout out here and start this off.

**Yishai Beeri** (1:07)
Yeah, it's awesome to see the local response and really great content, great guests. And we love to have the Dev Interrupted brand behind us.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:18)
And for those who don't know, if you're a Hebrew speaker, want to check that out, you can find that at devinterrupted.com or across all the podcasting apps. It's hosted by Yishai, the CTO of Linear B. And he's here for a really fascinating conversation today on the original Dev Interrupted show. We know that the closest analog to language loyalty and programming might be sports.
People are invested in, protective of and faithful to their favorite team and their programming language of choice, whether it's Python or whatever else you might pick.

**Yishai Beeri** (1:50)
Yep, or church.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:52)
Yes, church, religion's a great example too. The major difference between sports and programming language though is that teams actually have a win-loss record. So you can objectively say, oh, this team, my football team, they lost.
Didn't score enough goals, right? We know how they performed. Until now, we haven't had that with programming languages. We didn't have a way to judge how efficient, streamlined and constructive they are.
And from what I'm hearing, Yishai, that's changing now with LinearB's new research.

**Yishai Beeri** (2:23)
Yeah, so we're very interested in the process and the experience that developers go through. How do their daily lives look when trying to get work done as developers?
And obviously, the programming language you use as part of your tool set has a lot of impact on your experience and the way you collaborate with your teammates to get your code ready, reviewed, eventually merged and in production. So it was a very natural thing for us to look at, to see how does the choice of programming language affect all of these things.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:59)
So I think it's a great fit for this kind of LinearB Labs format, where we dive into the most interesting research of the developer experience and how to use that information to improve engineering organizations, streamline code delivery. And I'm really excited to talk about this more and dive into what the LinearB Labs data team found out about how developers are experiencing their programming languages. What languages have the most PRs or the longest ones? Which one labor under larger sizes?
Crossover and more. So great to have you on the show, Yishai. I'm excited to see what you want to dive into.

**Yishai Beeri** (3:32)
Yeah, I'm excited to be here and really interesting what the research shows.
We focused naturally on the things that are most crucial to the effectiveness of the team and to the ability to get work done.
So you mentioned how long does the PR live for? What's the required process? And how long does it take me to get my code reviewed? Which is a crucial piece of the developer life cycle. And then another angle which is crucially important is how large are my code changes? Am I able to make very minimized, very clear, elegant changes to my code to get the effect that I need? Or do I need to create a monster that then is very difficult to review? Very complex, a lot of code lines are changing and so on. And programming languages apparently have some impact on those numbers.

**Conor Bronsdon** (4:27)
I'm really excited to dig into that data. And I want to give the audience some context about you first. So they probably know me at this point. I'm a co-host, Dev Interrupted. I host our LinearB Labs session, Conor Bronsdon. Great to see you all again.