Strong typing, a hill I'm willing to die on

Re:Strong typing, a hill I'm willing to die on by lolinder on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @07:38PM (#37773163)

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 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.

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Re:Strong typing, a hill I'm willing to die on by berkes on Thursday October 05, 2023 @05:49AM (#37776636)

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?

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