[ruskimalooski]

These graphs really mean nothing. There is no data behind them. I might as well make a graph that conveys a non-descript correlation between how much an article bashes static typing & assertion and how high it is on HN.

[gipp]

They're just sketches. That's part of the point, and the article says that directly. The point isn't the exact shape or slope of the curves, but just their asymptotic behavior and the relationship of "correct features/day" to the other two. I.e. As long as the two curves have that general shape, then the "sweet spot" exists somewhere between 0-100%, the exact location of which depends on language, developer experience, and business priorities. The exact numbers are irrelevant to the article's point.

[ruskimalooski]

But even the asymptotes are an assumption derived from pure thought experiment.

[dwaltrip]

More realistically, it's an educated guess based off the author's personal experience as well as their understanding of the experiences of other developers operating under different constraints.

The author makes it clear that the analysis is not perfectly rigorous. There is a very wide landscape between perfectly rigorous and completely useless.

Do you think the article fails to hint at any of the fundamental dynamics of how type systems affect software development? How so?

[raquo]

I'm not who you're replying to, but for me the charts didn't make sense either.

For one example, I don't think it's a given that the green line (velocity vs % type-checked) should have a negative slope. Maybe in some cases, for some projects or some people, but certainly not universally. At least part of it would have been positive on almost all projects that I've worked on, and I'm not doing rocket science.

Then, the combined chart just looks at the amount of bug-free output, completely ignoring the amount of bug-ridden output. That latter part doesn't just get discarded, it needs fixing, and bugs that were only discovered in production are expensive to discover, debug and fix.

This is in addition to pretty much every other top level comment in this thread, a lot of which bring up important points that are unaccounted for even conceptually in the charts.

[igouy]

Quote -- "The answer of course is simple (and I'm sure many of you have already typed it up in an angry response). The curves I drew above are completely made up."

[zzbzq]

Think again--since when do graphs depict only cold, dry data? Graphs have always been useful for depicting relationships--real or proposed. Line graphs in particular are often found depicting proposed relationships rather than real data (though often inferred from data,) since for all cases where the real data is discrete, this would result in a scatter plot rather than a line.

[mwkaufma]

You beat me to the same comment. It's pseudoscience. I guess they're measuring the anxiety at HN that people's sunk-costs in stringly-typed runtimes won't keep guarenteeing obscene salaries.