Why you shouldn't try to make a case for a particular programming language in your thesis

While writing my thesis, at some point, I did a whole section about the programming language used in the work. I thought it was a good thing to do at the moment and I wanted to present the benefits and the differences of the language used vs other programming languages. This is so naive.

My thesis is not about programming languages. – so why even bring that up?

Unsupported claims will harm more than help your thesis. In a scientific paper every statement should be supported by a citation to another paper that defends such statement or an explanation from you. How will you give an explanation for something you haven’t researched properly?

Proving such statement would require alone another thesis. – which you probably don’t have the time.

Because no one cares? Finally, the most important reason, if people are reading your work, most likely they aren’t looking for a particular case on a specific programming language but rather what you did, how you did it and what results you’ve obtained.

Back to the cave..cya

One thought on “Why you shouldn't try to make a case for a particular programming language in your thesis

  1. I watched some students defending their master thesis and whenever they didn't justify the choice of one particular language they would get blamed for that. You don't need to do a thorough comparison of all the languages but you should definitely try justifying your choice. For instance, if you chose an interpreted language (be it Perl, Python, Ruby, etc..) it comes with a price: performance. Most evaluators will ask you why you did your choice and you should know how to justify it. Interoperability and portability could be one answer, but you should always provide one.

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