Software fault prevention by language choice: why C is not my favorite language. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/software.pdf

Abstract

How much does the choice of a programming language influence the prevalence of bugs in the resulting code? It seems obvious that at the level at which individuals write new programs, a change of language can eliminate whole classes of errors, or make them possible. With few exceptions, recent literature on the engineering of large software systems seems to neglect language choice as a factor in overall quality metrics. As a point of comparison we review some interesting recent work which implicitly assumes a program must be written in C. We speculate on how reliability might be affected by changing the language, in particular if we were to use ANSI Common Lisp.