> Static typing? One study, presented at FSE 2014, found no evidence that static typing is helpful—or harmful
And yet the abstract of the linked paper says:
> Most notably, it does appear that strong typing is modestly better than weak typing, and among functional languages, static typing is also somewhat better than dynamic typing.
If you click through the link in that sentence to https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ or read the study itself, you'll see that the paper doesn't support the claims made in the abstract at all.
It used automatic classification that's obviously wrong. Table 1 gives a list of "top" projects for each language and many of them are simply misclassified.
> ... the "top three" TypeScript projects are bitcoin, litecoin, and qBittorrent). These are C++ projects. So the intermediate result appears to not be that TypeScript is reliable, but that projects mis-identified as TypeScript are reliable. Those projects are reliable because Qt translation files are identified as TypeScript and it turns out that, per line of code, giant dumps of config files from another project don't cause a lot of bugs. It's like saying that a project has few bugs per line of code because it has a giant README. This is the most blatant classification error, but it's far from the only one.
> For example, of what they call the "top three" perl projects, one is showdown, a javascript project, and one is rails-dev-box, a shell script and a vagrant file used to launch a Rails dev environment. Without knowing anything about the latter project, one might expect it's not a perl project from its name, rails-dev-box, which correctly indicates that it's a rails related project.
There are other major problems with the study, but that one is sufficient to make the results invalid.
And yet the abstract of the linked paper says:
> Most notably, it does appear that strong typing is modestly better than weak typing, and among functional languages, static typing is also somewhat better than dynamic typing.