3 ms·

Exactly my thoughts! The article and many commenters here all talk about programmer ergonomics, productivity and "correctness". The current research shows tha

by dgb23 3y ago

Exactly my thoughts! The article and many commenters here all talk about programmer ergonomics, productivity and "correctness". The current research shows that these things are neither improved nor weakened by static typing. There are (even recent) papers on comparing typed vs dynamic language with no meaningful results. So basically it's entirely subjective. However there _is_ an actual effect of static typing that can be trivially proven: It enables a programmer to write more efficient code. That should be at the forefront of every discussion around typing discipline, because everything else is just _hot air_ at this point. TypeScript (used in the article) is an example that is _not_ actually strongly typed (it's statically typed but weak) and it doesn't even provide performance and memory layout guarantees, because the types are just comments. So you pay all of the cost of static typing without _any_ of the tangible benefits except documentation. To me it is surprising that we as a technical community completely ignore actual evidence and take our cultural and personal preferences as fact.

lolinder 3y ago
As other commenters have noted, the evidence here is really weak either way. The controlled studies are all done on college students, and therefore on pretty small short-lived projects. My instincts tell me that while static types may be optional at that scale, they are essential on large commercial projects that last for years, and projects like that are nearly impossible to properly study. Other studies try to compare bug rates between open source projects, but it's hard to be confident in answers gleaned from that kind of observational study. As long as the evidence is so weak, the industry will continue to ignore the research and go with our instincts.
- berkes 3y ago
  Also, many of these controlled studies must be taken with a grain of salt. Where the "grain" and the "salt" are the actual details, variables and boundaries of the study. Aside from what you mention -longevity- many other variables will or can influence the outcome. Some extremes: Juniors vs seniors vs mixed teams. Teams with many on-boarding and flying around between projects vs solo devs chugging along for decades on a single codebase. Using frameworks/architectures/design-principles vs yolo-architecture. No tech debt vs responsible tech debt vs crippling tech debt. Agencies who only deliver (i.e. the throw-it-over-the-wall business) vs teams that must maintain; for decades. I'm quite certain that if you are an agency that builds websites for small businesses, wordpress (PHP) and/or react (JS) with bazillion libs just glued together in a "works here" manner will give the highest ROI: you don't have to maintain, upgrade, scale, secure, etc it anyway. Statically typed languages will harm their business (but, I'm convinced, will benefit their customers and our industry at large) because that's: deliver fast&cheap at the cost of all else. I'm certain, because I helped such agencies improve their ROI. "YOLO" turned out to be the most important factor to increase revenue (on short term!). I'm certain that if you are a startup who must onboard new hires because your are rapidly growing, having solid and enforced guidelines and guardrails in place helps a lot. One such guardrail is a typing system. (I'm certain because I've been there, we didn't have any: it took new hires month(s) to have their first PR merged) I'm certain that if you have mixed teams where the seniors can get juniors unstuck, and where seniors can design and build the type systems (bounded domains, value-objects) the architecture (e.g. outside layers/adapters that ensure everything within is guaranteed typed) the juniors are far more productive too. I'm certain because I've been in this role and we saw productivity improve drastically. etc. Such controlled studies are not only hard to do, they need to be read with even more care: did they study a situation or control for my cases at all?
the_af 3y ago
> The current research shows that these things are neither improved nor weakened by static typing I think there's a difference between "current research hasn't been able to conclude anything" and "current research shows [thing]". I believe static typing is better, but that there's no conclusive research because there are many confounding variables and the experiments are really hard to conduct in the real world.
- tipiirai 3y ago
  > I believe static typing is better Like most of us here it seems. But do you prefer TypeScript over JavaScript? What is your belief / feeling?
  - the_af 3y ago
    I haven't touched either in more than a year, but when I did, I preferred TypeScript. I'm currently dealing with the awkward tooling Python has for types :(

by dgb23 3y ago

lolinder 3y ago

As other commenters have noted, the evidence here is really weak either way. The controlled studies are all done on college students, and therefore on pretty small short-lived projects. My instincts tell me that while static types may be optional at that scale, they are essential on large commercial projects that last for years, and projects like that are nearly impossible to properly study. Other studies try to compare bug rates between open source projects, but it's hard to be confident in answers gleaned from that kind of observational study. As long as the evidence is so weak, the industry will continue to ignore the research and go with our instincts.

berkes 3y ago
Also, many of these controlled studies must be taken with a grain of salt. Where the "grain" and the "salt" are the actual details, variables and boundaries of the study. Aside from what you mention -longevity- many other variables will or can influence the outcome. Some extremes: Juniors vs seniors vs mixed teams. Teams with many on-boarding and flying around between projects vs solo devs chugging along for decades on a single codebase. Using frameworks/architectures/design-principles vs yolo-architecture. No tech debt vs responsible tech debt vs crippling tech debt. Agencies who only deliver (i.e. the throw-it-over-the-wall business) vs teams that must maintain; for decades. I'm quite certain that if you are an agency that builds websites for small businesses, wordpress (PHP) and/or react (JS) with bazillion libs just glued together in a "works here" manner will give the highest ROI: you don't have to maintain, upgrade, scale, secure, etc it anyway. Statically typed languages will harm their business (but, I'm convinced, will benefit their customers and our industry at large) because that's: deliver fast&cheap at the cost of all else. I'm certain, because I helped such agencies improve their ROI. "YOLO" turned out to be the most important factor to increase revenue (on short term!). I'm certain that if you are a startup who must onboard new hires because your are rapidly growing, having solid and enforced guidelines and guardrails in place helps a lot. One such guardrail is a typing system. (I'm certain because I've been there, we didn't have any: it took new hires month(s) to have their first PR merged) I'm certain that if you have mixed teams where the seniors can get juniors unstuck, and where seniors can design and build the type systems (bounded domains, value-objects) the architecture (e.g. outside layers/adapters that ensure everything within is guaranteed typed) the juniors are far more productive too. I'm certain because I've been in this role and we saw productivity improve drastically. etc. Such controlled studies are not only hard to do, they need to be read with even more care: did they study a situation or control for my cases at all?

the_af 3y ago

> The current research shows that these things are neither improved nor weakened by static typing I think there's a difference between "current research hasn't been able to conclude anything" and "current research shows [thing]". I believe static typing is better, but that there's no conclusive research because there are many confounding variables and the experiments are really hard to conduct in the real world.

tipiirai 3y ago
> I believe static typing is better Like most of us here it seems. But do you prefer TypeScript over JavaScript? What is your belief / feeling?
- the_af 3y ago
  I haven't touched either in more than a year, but when I did, I preferred TypeScript. I'm currently dealing with the awkward tooling Python has for types :(