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by cix_pkez 2824 days ago
This is disingenuous. Quoting the abstract: ``` Language design does have a significant, but modest effect on software quality. Most notably, it does appear that disallowing type confusion is modestly better than allowing it, and among functional languages, static typing is also somewhat better than dynamic typing. We also find that functional languages are somewhat better than procedural languages. ```

The "statically typed" languages that you're focusing on (I say probably because they're the ones with high bug counts in the data) are probably C and C++, which have other issues making them higher in bug count. C is hardly even typed. Both have manual memory management.

Also, there's no control for commit frequency. Some people put everything in one commit, while others commit every line change. The Rails Tutorial even recommends the latter.

Lastly, Scala and Haskell killed in this study, as far as raw numbers go. But it doesn't seem significant.

I'll stick with subjective evaluations for now. This is just too hard to measure.

1 comments

I am simply referring to the result data from the study. I fail to see how that is disingenuous.

You say Scala and Haskell killed it in the study, and you are right, they were the third and second best language respectively with regards to low rates of bugs. Perhaps you also happened to notice (but failed to mention) what language did best of all: Clojure, a dynamically typed language.

I think the point is that all else being equal, static typing is better. But obviously all else is not very equal at all, and so in practice you can have a very well-designed dynamic language beating static ones on this metric.
I leave it to future readers to decide who's missing the point between the two of us.