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

[vux984]

If one uses Strongly Typed Languages, one gets fewer Strongly Typed Language errors; only.

Yes. And?

Catching type errors during compile is worlds better than finding at runtime, perhaps by an end user. Does it prevent logic errors, or memory leaks, or failure to sanitize inputs, or race conditions? No. It doesn't. So what?

If one uses a thermometer to check the temperature of cooked meat, one only reduces one type of infection vector. Are you suggesting the use of thermometers to check cooked meat isn't a good idea, because it won't prevent malaria or syphilis? Because that is how ridiculous your argument is.