Do Strongly Typed Languages Reduce Bugs? (acolyer.org)

"Static vs dynamic typing is always one of those topics that attracts passionately held positions," writes the Morning Paper -- reporting on an "encouraging" study that attempted to empirically evaluate the efficacy of statically-typed systems on mature, real-world code bases. The study was conducted by Christian Bird at Microsoft's "Research in Software Engineering" group with two researchers from University College London. Long-time Slashdot reader phantomfive writes: This study looked at bugs found in open source Javascript code. Looking through the commit history, they enumerated the bugs that would have been caught if a more strongly typed language (like Typescript) had been used. They found that a strongly typed language would have reduced bugs by 15%.

Does this make you want to avoid Python?

Comments

Re:You have to look at the source

[Z00L00K]

Since I have programmed in many different languages I have personally discovered that strongly statically typed languages do solve a lot of problems because the problems are encountered already at compile time, not during runtime. The problems are also less elusive.

There are of course still bugs around, but they are more often on the strategical level than on a pure sloppiness level caused by misspellings and mismatching methods where a method is changed but one caller isn't.