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The complete and utter lack of empirical evidence with regards to purported benefits of static typing is the real elephant in the room here I think. Considerin
by yogthos 10y ago
The complete and utter lack of empirical evidence with regards to purported benefits of static typing is the real elephant in the room here I think.
Considering how long both disciplines have been around, you'd think we'd see some clear benefits by now. Yet, here we are swapping anecdotal evidence.
- wereHamster 10y agoThe disciplines may have been around for long. But the industry has poured billions into educating people (students in universities) on C, Java, C++, C#. Comparatively little has been invested into educating people how to use and work with good type systems. You're comparing apples and oranges. You can't ask the general developer population how they feel about static vs dynamic typing. The result will be biased towards dynamic because that's the only thing most developers know.
- yogthos 10y agoConversely, a lot of people have have used dynamic typing in languages like JavaScript and Ruby. Their OO nature encourages creation of many types, while pervasive mutability removes any possibility to do local reasoning about the code. The situation is completely different in functional dynamic languages backed by immutable data structures.
- tome 10y agoIs there much empirical evidence for anything interesting in software development?
- yogthos 10y agoThere are lots of studies on the subject, none of them show anything even remotely conclusive. Here are a few examples: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590n/10au/hanenberg-oopsla2010.pdf https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590n/10au/hanen... http://macbeth.cs.ucdavis.edu/lang_study.pdf http://macbeth.cs.ucdavis.edu/lang_study.pdf http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/10668/1/tratt__dynamically_typed_languages.pdf http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/10668/1/tratt__dynamically_...