Clojurians Log v2

FWIW GPT can makehttps://chatgpt.com/share/69663841-a038-800a-a3ee-8279fe126e75

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/this-is-how-science-happens/ Hillel Wayne's newsletter and essays come back to this topic from time to time. Here's a writeup of a paper that attempts to empirically measure the impact of language on whether a commit introduces a defect in large-scale codebases. The results table is somewhat instructive. According to their data and defect model, Typescript seems to drive the largest reduction from the baseline defect rate. However, Clojure performs quite well! It is the runner-up and outperforms languages with powerful type systems like Scala and Haskell, and strongly outperforms other popular statically-typed languages (golang, C#, Java). Ruby also appears to outperform these languages.

I would also say that "proportion of commits that introduce a defect" doesn't capture every variable relevant to software engineering as well. A static type system can prevent you from committing broken code, but merely measuring the code that gets committed may leave out other variables, such as the time it takes to get a build working again after you broke something in the type system, which is likely happening prior to the actual commit.

My idea when sharing the GPT summary was not to share any truth oc. It was just to summarize the arguments that have been repeated again and again in different talks, essays, etc about the cons of static typing as perceived by programmers which would resonate or not with different people experiences (they do with mine). IMHO this is one of those cases were trying to do science misleads more than it helps, because the science will focus on a couple of metrics (like defects rates) which while an important aspect is far from the whole picture (there is fun, motivation, different contexts and domains, etc), and tends to push people away from accepting there are trade-offs that needs to be taken into account in each project, team, etc under the "this has been proved by science to be better".