[bjourne]

You might be interested in this classic article: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/675631

The author argued "yes, definitely", but most computer scientists answered "nah, too much work." People fond of $new language like to claim that if just all major software was rewritten in their favorite language life would be so much easier and bugs and security issues would be so much fewer. So you ask, "how do you know?" They answer: "It is obvious." "Have you tested it?" "There is no point, cause it is OBVIOUS!" "But if it is obvious, shouldn't it also be easy to test?" "We have NO TIME for that and if you don't see that $new language is better than $old language you are an IDIOT! Troll someone else!!" Or they'll argue that tests doesn't prove anything cause it depends on the context (like programmer skill, familiarity with $old and $new language, etc). Essentially, their hunch carries more weight than any quantitative data you could ever collect...

So much of software engineering is just shiny new thing after shiny new thing. No one knows whether the shiny new stuff is better than the old stuff or not. Even the book that introduced TDD & DP readily admitted that the project in which the development method was tested failed! Yet everyone adopted TDD because it was so "obvious" it was better.