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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> I am curious for why people say this

I'm saying it because it's a fact. I'm not giving you an opinion - it's a falsifiable fact that you can verify for yourself - we have as an industry not been able to give any good evidence for static typing reducing bugs that has stood up to peer review.

You're presenting arguments for why you think there should be evidence... but when people look there isn't actually any evidence. Maybe your arguments are not sound for some reason that we don't understand, or maybe we are unable to measure the effect.

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It does seem to me that you are conflating lack of evidence with non-existence though.

We haven't measured an effect but that doesn't mean that we can't reason about this in other ways. The lived experience of people that do this thing for a living can be an important resource. You could argue that we are getting in to soft social science here, but is there value in what the collective of trades people think about their tools?

We didn't know the science behind steal for a long time, but we still figured out how to make it and that it holds an edge really well.

Empirical measurement is not the only way to discover value.

Fwiw a similar pattern is seen in cooking, where lots of chefs have reasoned ideas of how things work based on tradition and lived hands on experience, yet are scientifically disproven.

Lived experience works to some extent, eliminating failures and making progress, like with your steal example, but that doesn’t mean it can pick optimal options from a list of options that all work to some reasonable extent; aka dynamic typing does also build software.

Well, this paper found that a conservative underestimate of 15% of bugs would be saved through static typing:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

I'm not sure what evidence your fact is based on, feel free to present some evidence for it.

> I'm not sure what evidence your fact is based on, feel free to present some evidence for it.

The linked meta-study in the article we're commenting on.

https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/

"under the specific set of circumstances described in the studies, any effect, if it exists at all, is small"

And this question has generated the most rebuttals and retractions I've ever seen for flawed studies in computer science - it's notorious.

Remember this?

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3340571

> Well, this paper found that a conservative underestimate of 15% of bugs would be saved through static typing

Yeah does look that one shows a larger effect and has not been rebutted or retracted. One positive measurement against many negative measurements.

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