Are you actually suggesting that "most static language users elect" to not decode at the boundaries of their system because it somehow is favorable to not do so? This does not match my perception of things, neither the "most are not decoding" part nor the "it's fine to not decode into a known good structure" part.
> It's an attractive idea to hedge your risks by usign a static language even if it only catches the trivial bugs and slows you down, because statically found bugs are a falsifiable observation, wheras making programming easier, faster and more fun[1] in general doesn't leave hard evidence unless you run duplicate trial projects just for science.
What an incredible straw man you've built up, but then you just let it sit there and don't even burn it up.
Since I'm not here to convince anyone, I can say your straw man is the opposite of my experience. I've never been able to prototype and change a system in any phase of its lifetime faster than I've been in Haskell. Haskell has downsides, but speed of development and maintenance is one of its strong points.
> I tend to think of static vs dynamic as a mindset question, where our bias of loss aversion rears its head.
Yup, and when it comes to fun, I've never had more fun programming that in Haskell, where I let the compiler check the annoying fiddly bits so my brain is free to tackle the meaty problems!
I'm was thinking protocol meta systems like protobufs where you use tooling to enforce closed world style communication patterns in a networked world.
By falsifiable I meant that it's an observation that could be shown to be false, if it was false. So a concept from philosophy of science, not an assertion.
Though it's telling how little static checking by type systems is leveraged eg in LLVM, so even in closed systems the assurance payoff for static checking doesn't necessarily get good bang for the buck.
Eg working with web based services, your code tends to communicate a lot with other services, and a very large % of bugs that make it further out than your dev laptop come from those interfaces. Making these part of the closed world of the static type system is done in some places but most static language users elect not to do it, preferring programmable checks in form of schemas or tests. Which I think tells something.
I tend to think of static vs dynamic as a mindset question, where our bias of loss aversion rears its head. It's an attractive idea to hedge your risks by usign a static language even if it only catches the trivial bugs and slows you down, because statically found bugs are a falsifiable observation, wheras making programming easier, faster and more fun[1] in general doesn't leave hard evidence unless you run duplicate trial projects just for science.
[1] For some personalities, you might derive more fun and satisfaction in the mathematical certainty of static languages. Or you might be in a work environment where you don't have room to find fun anyway. Or maybe you don't even like programming. Yet others find fun indispensable: fun is necessary for keeping up morale.