"All in all, the sweeping generalization about the concrete languages was introduced by you." I think the plain, direct language of the paper's conclusion is c

"All in all, the sweeping generalization about the concrete languages was introduced by you." I think the plain, direct language of the paper's conclusion is clear enough without me having to embellish it, and without its defenders extrapolating all of the qualifications and subtexts that they think I missed. You really don't have much to work with, because the paper's clumsy conclusion is small, blunt and unqualified in its scope. It takes a handful of small Python programs translated to an idiosyncratic language like Haskell and concluded: "in practice [dynamic typing with unit testing] is an inadequate replacement for static type checking." This is unequivocal language. There's no qualifications about language, context, or any kind of variables that might possibly dilute the strength of the conclusion. On the other hand, Peter Cooper gives a great example elsewhere on this thread of a much better paper with much broader scope, more stats, and much more modest, qualified conclusions. This is the kind of language that is useful and gives me confidence that the authors didn't start out with an axe to grind and merely followed what metrics they had to the warranted conclusion, no more, no less: "Even though the experiment seems to suggest that static typing has no positive impact on development time, it must not be forgotten that the experiment has some special conditions: the experiment was a one-developer experiment. Possibly, static typing has a positive impact in larger projects where interfaces need to be shared between developers. Furthermore, it must not be forgotten that previous experiments showed a positive impact of static type systems on development time." http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse590n/10au/hanenberg-oopsla2010.pdf http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse590n/10au/...