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I question the downsides you suggest. There was a study done where they had two groups of people implement the same thing, one with a dynamic language, the oth

I question the downsides you suggest. There was a study done where they had two groups of people implement the same thing, one with a dynamic language, the other with its equivalent static variant. What they found was that the people who used the dynamic language took 33% less time to complete the task. But what's interesting is students who were given the static typed variant all said they felt the type system helped them, and made them more productive. Now, that study can be criticised in a lot of ways, but as it stands, it's still better then people's opinions. I think it can feel like a drag sometimes in dynamic languages to figure out the type of things, and what structure the data comming into functions has, etc. But I suspect in practice, that feeling does not translate to lower productivity or higher defects.

klipt 9y ago
> two groups of people implement the same thing The obvious problem with that is that dynamically typed languages are great for prototyping things ... and implementing something quickly for a study sounds like prototyping. But statically typed languages really shine for maintenance and refactoring.
- didibus 9y ago
  > But statically typed languages really shine for maintenance and refactoring. Possibly, I've not been able to find any research related to the impact of the typing discipline on maintenance. All there is out there are studies on defect count of large code base projects. And those showed only marginal differences, certain dynamic languages like Clojure even beat out all others. So at least in terms of maintening quality over time, dynamic languages seem to hold up to static languages. What I've been trying to get data on is productivity over time. I know dynamic languages are more productive at the beginning, but do static languages get more productive over time is a good question. I still feel probably not, I think it's still just all a big feeling, but I've got no data on it.

klipt 9y ago

> two groups of people implement the same thing The obvious problem with that is that dynamically typed languages are great for prototyping things ... and implementing something quickly for a study sounds like prototyping. But statically typed languages really shine for maintenance and refactoring.

didibus 9y ago
> But statically typed languages really shine for maintenance and refactoring. Possibly, I've not been able to find any research related to the impact of the typing discipline on maintenance. All there is out there are studies on defect count of large code base projects. And those showed only marginal differences, certain dynamic languages like Clojure even beat out all others. So at least in terms of maintening quality over time, dynamic languages seem to hold up to static languages. What I've been trying to get data on is productivity over time. I know dynamic languages are more productive at the beginning, but do static languages get more productive over time is a good question. I still feel probably not, I think it's still just all a big feeling, but I've got no data on it.