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> In my experience, dynamically typed languages don't do well for developer productivity. At least one empirical study suggests static typing does not improve

> In my experience, dynamically typed languages don't do well for developer productivity. At least one empirical study suggests static typing does not improve programmer productivity. Source: http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590n/10au/hanenberg-oopsla2010.pdf http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590n/10au/hanenb... This is just one of the many common industry "wisdoms" that collapse under scientific scrutiny.

emcq 10y ago
That's a cool experiment, but from a quick read they are creating a compiler which is a bit different than web development. Looking at the related work all seem to contradict this finding and suggest preference to statically typed languages, such as one that looked at API development. From my own experience with dynamic types it's not the dev time that increases but maintenance time. When you have a team working on an evolving codebase with data types distributed in caches, databases, and code it seems inevitable that you will have an error if you don't do any type checks. Even good linters can miss something that would have been easy to catch with static type checks.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "That's a cool experiment, but from a quick read they are creating a compiler which is a bit different than web development." They're doing a lot of things wrong. See my reply.
deleted 10y ago
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nickpsecurity 10y ago
This study looks bad across the board. For one, they're writing a parser for a context-free grammar. That's not a good test for the benefits of static typing which often happen with very different types of data mixing, modifying large programs with less breakage, and so on. Contrary to your statement, there's a lot of reports and articles out there where switching to formal specs or a stronger type system reduced the number of defects. The first were in high-assurance where formal specs caught inconsistencies left and right. Later on, military and safety-critical firms looked at defect rates of C, C++, and Ada to find Ada's type system knocked them to half. This counter-example is about something so straight-forward there's many tools that can automate it with one formally-verified for correctness (w/ strongly typed language). Next, I look at the languages themselves. Java's type system is so weak to barely have any benefit. Terrible choice to test static typing. The control language is then a language based on Smalltalk... the original, great language for dynamic, OOP, and complex programs... that's even simpler than Java & could possibly boost productivity just due to easier review/revision. A proper comparison would be with something like Ocaml, Haskell, Ada/SPARK, or Rust that really uses a type-system with the high-level & composition benefits of something like Smalltalk. Makes me lean toward Ocaml or Haskell than others which slow productivity fighting with compiler. This paper doesn't prove anything for or against the topic. It's quite weak. The authors should do their next one on the kind of program that others in the field reported benefited from static, strong typing. Then, attempt an experiment on same type of software between a productive language with powerful, type system and a productive, dynamic language of similar complexity. Alternatively, try to modify similarly large applications in parts that touch a lot of the code base without breakage for both static and dynamic languages. Then, we might learn something.

emcq 10y ago

That's a cool experiment, but from a quick read they are creating a compiler which is a bit different than web development. Looking at the related work all seem to contradict this finding and suggest preference to statically typed languages, such as one that looked at API development. From my own experience with dynamic types it's not the dev time that increases but maintenance time. When you have a team working on an evolving codebase with data types distributed in caches, databases, and code it seems inevitable that you will have an error if you don't do any type checks. Even good linters can miss something that would have been easy to catch with static type checks.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
"That's a cool experiment, but from a quick read they are creating a compiler which is a bit different than web development." They're doing a lot of things wrong. See my reply.

deleted 10y ago

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nickpsecurity 10y ago

This study looks bad across the board. For one, they're writing a parser for a context-free grammar. That's not a good test for the benefits of static typing which often happen with very different types of data mixing, modifying large programs with less breakage, and so on. Contrary to your statement, there's a lot of reports and articles out there where switching to formal specs or a stronger type system reduced the number of defects. The first were in high-assurance where formal specs caught inconsistencies left and right. Later on, military and safety-critical firms looked at defect rates of C, C++, and Ada to find Ada's type system knocked them to half. This counter-example is about something so straight-forward there's many tools that can automate it with one formally-verified for correctness (w/ strongly typed language). Next, I look at the languages themselves. Java's type system is so weak to barely have any benefit. Terrible choice to test static typing. The control language is then a language based on Smalltalk... the original, great language for dynamic, OOP, and complex programs... that's even simpler than Java & could possibly boost productivity just due to easier review/revision. A proper comparison would be with something like Ocaml, Haskell, Ada/SPARK, or Rust that really uses a type-system with the high-level & composition benefits of something like Smalltalk. Makes me lean toward Ocaml or Haskell than others which slow productivity fighting with compiler. This paper doesn't prove anything for or against the topic. It's quite weak. The authors should do their next one on the kind of program that others in the field reported benefited from static, strong typing. Then, attempt an experiment on same type of software between a productive language with powerful, type system and a productive, dynamic language of similar complexity. Alternatively, try to modify similarly large applications in parts that touch a lot of the code base without breakage for both static and dynamic languages. Then, we might learn something.