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Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

cs.washington.edu

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Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#71

Post by exDM69 »

phamilton wrote: post #33

I recently talked to a friend of mine who expressed the frustration of not knowing what a function returns because it's a language without static typing. It was something I hadn't thought of before personally. I thought about it a bit and realized that as a Ruby programmer, I depended on two things to figure out what a function returns, and neither is the source or documentation (most of the time at least): 1) a REPL…

> a REPL. Just give it a whirl and see what you get.

A REPL is in no-way tied to having a dynamically typed or interpreted programming language. E.g. Haskell's GHCi has an excellent REPL environment where you can, in addition to evaluating code, ask for the type of an expression and do other static analyses.

I agree that a REPL makes a huge (mostly positive) difference on how you write code.

Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#72

Post by barik »

edanm wrote: post #57
fusiongyro wrote: post #32

The study may or may not be flawed, but what's really interesting to me is the reaction. We need more science in our computer science, which means more experiments and more results like this. We should also be open to the truth that we use the tools we like because we like them rather than because they're technically superior, even though we pimp them ad nauseum as though they are. I once read an article about a tech…

I think your point is important, and well made. The only problem is, people have been doing these experiments for 30 years, and do you know what the net effect it's had on the world of programmers: none at all. Saying "no no, this time really listen to this study " seems to be having no effect. There are a lot of causes for this, not least of all the things you mention (nobody cares about science, people like or disl…

"In fact, one of the few studies that people actually believe is the "some programmers are 10x better" study, and that was actually fairly well conducted - many students were given identical tasks, and a fairly large amount of time to do them."

Can you by chance point me to this paper? I'd like to add it to my paper collection, since most of the studies I've seen concerning programmer variability use members of the workforce. I'm not aware of the one involving students, but such replication studies are easy to miss.

Thanks!

Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#73

Post by pjmlp »

cromwellian wrote: post #13

Studying 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,…

You are hitting exactly the main point.

Dynamic languages are very good for prototyping or small scale projects.

But they fail to address the context of programming large scale applications with teams distributed across multiple sites.

Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#74

Post by elderberry »

pjmlp wrote: post #73
cromwellian wrote: post #13

Studying 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,…

You are hitting exactly the main point. Dynamic languages are very good for prototyping or small scale projects. But they fail to address the context of programming large scale applications with teams distributed across multiple sites.

I'm betting youtube is bigger than all of your sites combined, and they use python.

Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#75

Post by xymostech »

elderberry wrote: post #74
pjmlp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are hitting exactly the main point. Dynamic languages are very good for prototyping or small scale projects. But they fail to address the context of programming large scale applications with teams distributed across multiple sites.

I'm betting youtube is bigger than all of your sites combined, and they use python.

And good on them. But that doesn't mean it's easy to write large websites in dynamically-typed programming languages, it just means that they are very good at what they do.

Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#76

Post by bad_user »

batista wrote: post #34
cromwellian wrote: post #13

Studying 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,…

> Studying individuals is the wrong experiment. Static typing benefits tooling most when you have larger groups of programmers who much collaborate, often asynchronously. Absolutely. And also: static typing benefits is not about "development time" but about maintenance, adding stuff, refactoring etc. If anything, dynamic typing would be expected to lead to faster development time, which is also why it's used in most…

     Did enough of them use an editor/IDE that could
     take advantage of a static type system?
Just because the language is static, that doesn't mean it benefits from an IDE.

For instance, Scala has fairly good integration on top of Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, however every time I try doing some work in Scala, I end up cursing and screaming, because these Scala IDE plugins are slow, incomplete and unstable and get in my way. And I can't blame their authors, because Scala is a difficult language to deal with.

Another example would be C++, which has been around for a very long time and is one of the most popular programming languages ever. And yet even Visual Studio has problems with its refactoring/IntelliSense support.

And then there are the Smalltalk environments, still around, still kicking ass.

Here's the thing ... there are static languages, and then there are languages designed for usage within an IDE ;-) Java, C# and Smalltalk are like that, while Scala, Haskell and C++ aren't.

Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#77

Post by quadhome »

Looking over the comments, WOW, please please PLEASE read the paper! This title on HN is very misleading. A static type system had no POSITIVE effect on development time. The study is casting doubts on POSITIVE impact of static type systems.

To quote:

We measured two different points in the development: first, the development time until a minimal scanner has been implemented, and second the quality of the resulting software measured by the number of successful test cases fulfilled by the parser. In none of these measured points the use of a static type system turned out to have a successful impact. In the first case, the use of a statically typed programming language had a significant negative impact, in the latter one, no significant difference could be measured.

Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#78

Post by quadhome »

xymostech wrote: post #75
elderberry wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm betting youtube is bigger than all of your sites combined, and they use python.

And good on them. But that doesn't mean it's easy to write large websites in dynamically-typed programming languages, it just means that they are very good at what they do .

No, it doesn't. It doesn't mean anything except that your belief isn't supported by any scientific data (as far as presented in this thread).

Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#79

Post by quadhome »

tikhonj wrote: post #62

If anything, I think this study is actually in favor of static typing. Why? Well, most of the proponents of dynamic typing claim it makes development faster. Most proponents of static typing concede this point, but claim that while it may slow down initial development, it makes maintenance much easier. Of course, this study is fairly limited and drawing conclusions from it is probably premature. I would not base any…

No, it isn't. Please read the paper and not the HN title.

The paper clearly states that static typing slowed development time down.

Re: Study of 49 programmers: static type system had no effect on development time

#80

Post by quadhome »

jfoutz wrote: post #3

so, 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... )

Please read the paper and not the HN title.

The paper's title is casting doubts on the positive impact of statically typed languages as they had a negative impact on development time. (though not quality)

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