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by djur 4390 days ago
Empirical evidence. Studies indicating that software developed in statically-typed languages has fewer defects. Research into the speed of development and the ability to accommodate major changes in requirements and functionality would be useful as well.

Last I looked, there isn't a great deal of literature on this, and what there is is fairly old (dealing with '80s-'90s languages) and inconclusive.
1 comments
adamnemecek 4390 days ago
Is the presentation not good enough?

> Research into the speed of development and the ability to accommodate major changes in requirements and functionality would be useful as well.

You kind of slipped those in, we were talking about correctness.

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taeric 4390 days ago
No we weren't. We were talking about "being less bug prone" and "easier to read."

Though, I'm not entirely sure that really changes much. :(

Look, I'm not against static typing. I confess to being somewhat in love with lisp at the moment. And, I'm trying to learn MIXAL for some unholy reason. At the same time, I try to type my systems as well as I can. I am far from convinced that typing will be the way to go.

Especially if you consider auxiliary tools. Having used Coverity some, it is down right impressive the stability you can bring to a C codebase with proper discipline and the appropriate tooling. Compared to using something such as a Scala codebase, where right now your only recourse is the compiler.

That is, static analysis does not begin and end with the compiler. Sadly, in moving to "newer" statically typed languages, you through out many of the tools that currently exist in the older languages.

And this is not just for "correctness". Having finally added "-march=native" to my flags for a build of software, I'm literally amazed at how well optimized a compile can be versus just using "-O3". Optimizations in the modern world are quite amazing without necessarily needing "better types."

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adamnemecek 4389 days ago
Remind me, what's the typing discipline of the languages supported by Coverity?
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taeric 4389 days ago
Isn't that a touch of a diversion? With the large target area of code covered by C, it makes the most sense that that is the heaviest targetted area. This list[1] shows that there are plenty of options to go around. Even Perl gets some love. :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_a...

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adamnemecek 4389 days ago
You do realize that all those tools for dynamic languages are code formatters right? That they won't catch any real bugs. You do realize that right? Why do you think that they can't catch any real bugs? Hint: it has to do with static typing or lack thereof.
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taeric 4389 days ago
That is like claiming a tool like lint can't be used to catch bugs. And... not all of them are. Did you read all of the tools in the "mixed languages" section? Quite a few of the really good tools can find mistakes in dynamic languages.

Shit, this is no different than the article making the rounds talking about the many "gotchas" in bash scripting. Just making a tool that spots those is likely to catch and help correct errors.

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djur 4389 days ago
The presentation was interesting, but if there were any studies cited I didn't see them. I'm looking for deductive research into the proposal that using a modern statically-typed language results in a better outcome than a modern dynamically-typed one.

The related research I mentioned is useful because if development in a given language improves correctness but also increases development time by an order of magnitude it might still be more effective to develop software in the "worse" language and spend the additional available time mitigating the risk or building additional features.

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