8 ms·

> There's no hard evidence that static typing improves reliability. I'm curious how you came to that conclusion? https://pleiad.cl/papers/2012/kleinschmagerAl

• rastrian 10mo ago
  I was searching for the Stefik article to argue here, thank you.
• pizlonator 10mo ago
  I don't consider a human subjects study to be "hard evidence". So, we can safely disregard these papers. They got exactly the result that they sought out to get, and the papers were published because they confirmed the preexisting groupthink.
  • rowanG077 10mo ago
    Interesting, so you consider the entire scientific field of medicine to work without hard evidence?
    • pizlonator 10mo ago
      You mean psychology? There’s no hard evidence there. The papers you’re citing are using human subjects in that sort of way. It’s pseudoscience at best Medicine that involves testing human subject response to treatments is very different from the papers you’re citing and does involve falsifiable theses (usually, definitely not always).
      • rowanG077 10mo ago
        I didn't link any studies. I'm not the person you originally replied to. I was trying to engage in your point that studies involving human subjects cannot contain hard evidence. And no I wasn't referring to psychology in my comment.
        • pizlonator 10mo ago
          Then you’re changing context for no reason. My point about human subjects is in the context of the linked studies. I’m not super interested in further debating human subjects in science generally
• zephen 10mo ago
  If you're going to start citing research, you should look at the Cooley finding on verilog vs VHDL.
  • therealcamino 10mo ago
    That's certainly an interesting data point, but it was a 90 minute programming contest, not peer-reviewed research.
    • zephen 10mo ago
      The second paper shown above is firewalled. The first paper shown above was presented at ICPC, which has a history of bias in reviewing, and typically only assigns one or two reviewers in any case. Which makes it not surprising that the paper itself doesn't really prove anything, except that the authors themselves are good at creating dissimilar situations. Subjects had to modify existing systems, which were provided by the experimenters. The experimenters deliberately removed any semblance of anything that might hint at types (comments, variable names, etc.) and did who the fuck knows what else to the dynamically typed code to make it difficult to work with. They also provided their own IDE and full environment which the participants had to use. Now, of course, we've all seen the graphs which show that for simple problems, dynamic is better, and there's a crossover point, and, of course Cooley's experiment is on the far left of that graph, so it certainly doesn't prove that strict static typing isn't better for large programs, but it's at least honest in its approach and results, using self-selected working practitioners (and there was never any shortage of working practioners swearing by how much better VHDL is). https://danluu.com/verilog-vs-vhdl/ https://danluu.com/verilog-vs-vhdl/
• patrickmay 10mo ago
  The benefits of static typing with regard to reliability are unclear, at best: https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/