Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cs.washington.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 192 posts

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

#111

Post by jbranchaud »

tikhonj wrote: post #53
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've only scanned the comments, but the chief reaction seems to be exactly what you want for a scientific approach--people are arguing about the scope and methodology of the study. A paper like this is not some broad-reaching conclusion--it's very specific and based on some potentially flawed methodology. You want people to qualify exactly how specific it is and talk about potential flaws in its approach. That's how…

"Almost no CS papers I've read have contained empirical studies."

You aren't reading the right papers then. At least in Software Engineering, you can't get into the main conferences (ICSE and FSE) without a pretty significant empirical study.

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

#112

Post by xyzzyz »

ExpiredLink wrote: post #102
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…

> We need more science in our computer science, which means more experiments and more results like this. There is an ongoing experiment wrt the usability of programming languages, libraries, frameworks, concepts, ... It's called the market.

Market is testing for many more different features than just usability, and as such is rather useless if you want to test a single thing.

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

#113

Post by johnchristopher »

ExpiredLink wrote: post #102
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…

> We need more science in our computer science, which means more experiments and more results like this. There is an ongoing experiment wrt the usability of programming languages, libraries, frameworks, concepts, ... It's called the market.

What are the market's conclusions regarding dynamic and static typing ?

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

#114

Post by rwallace »

route66 wrote: post #97

I'm a bit puzzled which role programmer ability has in this experiment. What strikes me is the enormous spread in programmer quality within each group. Varying from 0.7 to 15 hours for the scanner assignment and 50% to 100% of succeeded test cases. The spread occurs over both groups. That programmer quality shows way stronger effects than the measured effect of a typing system would suggest to me that - the measureme…

That programmer ability beats language choice by orders of magnitude, is already a familiar fact, so that would seem a satisfactory explanation for the observed variance.

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

#115

Post by pcopley »

aangjie wrote: post #38
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 second that.It's one of the reasons i quit my day job to do a Master's degree...though i chose a naive enough college and course that am now back to a programming job where i am surrounded by the same type of crowd again.

I'm curious what your Master's is in and what "type" you're surrounded by.

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

#116

Post by njs12345 »

pubby wrote: post #93
stiff wrote: post #36

It seems to be very basic static typing along the lines what Java or C has stashed on top an Smalltalkesque object-oriented language, so I am not surprised, the many years I used dynamically typed languages I maybe once or twice had a type error of the kind "confusing int with string" (e.g. when selecting a number from database and it being returned as string). For the benefits of static typing I would rather look in…

I'd be more interested in comparing Haskell to one of those even stronger typed programming languages. I'm forgetting the name of them, but it would be interesting to see how much is too much.

Are you thinking of Agda/Coq/Idris, which have dependent types? If you understand a bit of type theory, this is an interesting paper: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/papers/popl99.pdf

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

#118

Post by ozataman »

I think there are several flaws in this study, but alas, its subject is quite inflammatory and it is easy for people to gloss over the details and start drawing conclusions.

Here are a few things to keep in mind, IMO:

- Good/capable/flexible static languages are much much harder to design than dynamic ones. Case in point is Haskell, where hundreds (thousands?) of researches have been working for years to widen the area of expression vs. area of safety. The devised language for this study seems very minimalistic to be useful. Most dynamic languages, on the other hand, pretty much let you do anything even when they have a simplistic design.

- I find that people take longer to become fast/useful in static languages. While you can just throw things together and tweak until it works with a dynamic language, a static one will force you more to know what you're doing. I had a semi-technical colleague who had a much much easier time getting up to speed with Python than with any other static language. Therefore, unless the study involves a long prep time, it will naturally be skewed towards lower devel time in dynamic.

- Static languages start shining as the project size/time-line grows. Key affected areas are refactoring, intra-team communication and incremental improvements on the code. To test for this, it would be interesting to stage a time lapse where developers are asked to modify their previous parsers after, say, a month of total separation.

I think a more interesting study would be to hire 20 highly decorated Python devs and 20 highly decorated Haskell devs and give them a few different computational tasks, overall adding up to a large # of hours. Naturally, the study needs to limit usage of 3-rd party libs and take other normalizing measures. Then we may get a sense for what the state-of-the-art in both fronts have to offer.

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

#119

Post by ozataman »

jshen wrote: post #23
FollowSteph3 wrote: post #14

My 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…

I work for a fortune 20 company and my last employer was a fortune 10 company. My experience is the opposite of yours. I've never seen these consistent wins you talk about, despite my years at some of the largest corporations.

Have you also used dynamic languages extensively as part of large teams at your employer? Dealing with lots of people over long periods of time is messy, no matter what language/tool you use. I think the claim is just that static typing gives you better results than dynamic typing. All relative..

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

#120

Post by ozataman »

arihant wrote: post #41

Development time with static languages is not an issue. Try comparing the time one needs to change the codebase written in ML and the one written in Lisp and come back. It is experimentation and change that is slow in static typing.

If anything, it is my experience that static typing makes it much easier to refactor large amounts of code.

I remember numerous instances where I make a large change in one Haskell module resulting in a few changes in the module's external interface, the compiler systematically warns me of all the 20 other modules that needed changing, and lo-and-behold, if it compiles, it works.

Post reply on HN