[boyakasha]

Exactly. There is a lot of post-hoc rationalisation happening, along the lines of:

> I like language/technology X. Why? Well I'm obviously a super smart and rational person, so my preferences could only be based on facts and logic. Therefore everything I like must be objectively correct. QED.

Anecdotally, the more someone prides themselves on being intelligent and logical, the less skeptical they are of their unsubstantiated emotional judgements.

Despite primarily working in dynlangs, I would guess that type systems affect developer productivity somewhere in the range of +-50%. While I have pulled that number directly from my ass, I think that if the effect size was larger then there wouldn't be much of a debate. If a company could swap languages for any given team and get 3x more functionality, or get the same work done for 1/3rd of the cost, we would know about it already. And to be clear, 3x productivity is achievable, but not by simply switching to Haskell.

[JackMorgan]

Keep in mind though, the statement that "and get 3x the functionality" <- right there, that's what is unmeasurable. We can't know. We have no unit of measurement, so no one could possibly know. A practice could be 100x faster, but because software is rarely as important as marketing, sales, and luck, we'd never know. A dev team that's 100x slower could still win, and it probably happens regularly. It's the essential issue with all tech discussions. We assume that "hand waving" someone would notice. But without any unit of measurement, I posit that no one ever will. There are so many network effects that change the success of a software project that is unlikely that even in another 50 years we will have consensus.