What about maintenance? I've never heard a static-typing proponent claim they can develop faster. It's always that they can maintain the software with much less work and have less overhead at run time.
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
#12I tend to find the strongest proponents of static typing are the least familiar with dynamic languages
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#13Studying individuals is the wrong experiment. Static typing benefits tooling most when you have larger groups of programmers who much collaborate, often asynchronously. It's easy to hold a mental model of the code you write in your head and minimize mistakes, it's harder to hold a mental model of a larger program consisting of code written by many programmers.
I'd like to see them hand a pre-written codebase of say, 10,000 lines to a bunch of students, and ask them to make large changes/new features to the codebase.
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#14My big problem with this study is that the project sizes and teams are too small. Static typing really starts to get it's power as the team and project get bigger. This is especially true as the skill levels from larger teams start to spread from amazing all the way down to terrible. In smaller teams you can often work with higher quality developers, but with larger corporate systems, you don't have that luxury. You have to deal with all kinds of experience levels, etc. You need to be able to modulize the project, etc.
From my personal experience, dynamic typing usually works well with 1-2 developers and continues to be useful until about 4-5 developers (static typing too for that matter). After that, static typing usually wins pretty consistently.
My personal preference is static typing. I find it makes the code more readable and catches a lot of oopses early, at compile time. Otherwise you just end up writing a ton of test cases and hope to catch the same issues at runtime. So you have less protection (you have to catch it with a test), and you just end up spending more time writing tests anyways.
I do understand the benefits of both, I just prefer static typing because of the way I work. Both work and have their places. Like everything else, you need to use the right tool for the right job AND the right people.
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#15I tend to find the strongest proponents of static typing are the least familiar with dynamic languages
I work daily in dynamic languages. It cuts both ways.
I don't think it's a big deal.
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#161. They didn't ask me.
2. They ought to check on maintenance effort and time with different type systems as well.
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#1749 undergraduate students working independently on a small project over the course of a single week using a previously unseen language with no consideration of the performance or maintainability of the resulting code. I can't see how there are any meaningful conclusions to be drawn from this study other than "inexperienced programmers find learning new dynamically typed languages easier".
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#18The 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?…
I think in a lot of cases programmers are happiest with their new hotness simply because they became better and more experienced programmers in the process of learning the new hotness, not because the new hotness is 'good' necessarily.
Cf. node.js
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#19It could also be the case that it is faster to write text parsers in dynamic languages as opposed to static ones. There are so many different variables to come to a meaningful conclusion. What about working on very large programs with other people?
Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time
#20I don't think you can show much of anything in 27 hours of development time. Neither the advantages nor the drawbacks of static typing will have any impact on productivity for such a small one off, single developer, throw away project.
It seems the only question this experiment could possibly claim to answer is whether or not the additional finger typing required by static languages affects the coding speed of these particular 49 undergrads.