Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
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Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#2The study followed 49 undergraduates who had taken Java classes. I would argue that, because of this, the students were probably more experienced with static type systems.
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#3so, by swiching from python to haskell, you can get code that's 20x faster for no extra development time? sounds like a win to me. (cherry picked shootout data - http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan...)
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#4The study followed 49 undergraduates who had taken Java classes. I would argue that, because of this, the students were probably more experienced with static type systems.
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Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#5In my own experience: if I write dynamic code I'm still thinking of types. Especially in Python.. What's mutable, what isn't... This is what my professors at school say too. Less typing (pressing keys) doesn't make you think faster!
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#6An interesting study, but really hard to compare. It's like attempting a discussion of the effectiveness/efficiency of Engligh vs French (using conjugations or sex).
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#7The study followed 49 undergraduates who had taken Java classes. I would argue that, because of this, the students were probably more experienced with static type systems.
Great point. Correlation != causation.
At the end of the day it's about what YOU can hack it with.
Use that language.
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#8so, by swiching from python to haskell, you can get code that's 20x faster for no extra development time? sounds like a win to me. (cherry picked shootout data - http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/which-programming-lan... )
only 20x? What happens when you reevaluate it with the python code not having any pieces that are C under the covers? (my understanding that a lot of python idioms for fast code basically turn into ah "use the approach that pushes as much work into C as possible")
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#9The study followed 49 undergraduates who had taken Java classes. I would argue that, because of this, the students were probably more experienced with static type systems.
A good point. Also, 49 programmers is very little. But even with thousands of developers using all sorts of languages, it's still moot to draw any conclusion from. It's very subjective and dependant on people's experience/taste/State-of-mind..
For me, switching from static (java) to dynamic typing (common lisp) has saved me a lot of development time. Or did it? Maybe it was Emacs? Maybe it was functional programming? Maybe it was the REPL? Maybe experience?
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#10Well I think the article hints at the real benefits from type systems. They took longer in the beginning understanding the type system, but made up for it later on by being able to finish in the same amount of time. Static systems be balling for refactoring.
Hopefully for the next experiment they have them tackle a longer project, and have the programmers tackle short problems in multiple languages to 'rank' them.