Agreed with your overall premise, but this particular study doesn't meet the criteria to have any conclusions drawn from its results. The number of programmers

Agreed with your overall premise, but this particular study doesn't meet the criteria to have any conclusions drawn from its results. The number of programmers is too small and skills not representative (49 undergrad programmers). The problem (writing a simple scanner / parser) isn't one that will really benefit from a decent type system. All you need need are ints, strings, and arrays and you're good to go.