[Tainnor]

Show me the companies that only ever implement policies that have shown to be effective in rigorous empirical studies.

Usually some person (or a group of people) is in charge of some decision and that person will make judgment calls based on their beliefs. This is no less true of programming techniques than it is of management styles, corporate strategy or anything else.

Your insistence that we may not have beliefs about the very things we work with daily, unless they're empirically verified, is IMHO frankly ridiculous.

[pron]

That's not my insistence at all. You can believe what you like. What you can't do is make empirical assertions that we've not been able to validate empirically.

Companies may adopt a technique based on empirical findings or anything else they like; most people choose a favourite programming language because they like working with it better. But the statement that types lead to fewer bugs is a very particular assertion that is simply unsupported by evidence. You may believe that using types reduces baldness and make your choices based on that, but it's still a conjecture/belief at best.

[Tainnor]

I think you're guilty yourself of what you're accusing other people of.

I haven't seen people ITT arguing that there is empirical evidence for types providing better correctness guarantees, just that they strongly believe it to be the case given their own experience.

[pron]

The original statement was "A language with static types would have made it easier to build correct software." This is an empirical claim that the evidence does not support. Note that it's not that there's merely no evidence supporting the claim, but that studies designed to support the claim failed to do so.