Can We Enforce a Benefit for Dynamically Typed Languages in Comparison to Statically Typed Ones? A Controlled Experiment

摘要

There are a number of experiments that show a benefit for statically typed programming languages. However, it is unclear whether these results are mainly driven by the expectations that developers do benefit from static type systems, i.e. whether the results reflect on the experimenters' bias. From that perspective, it seems consequent to design an experiment that tries to reveals the opposite: to enforce a benefit for dynamically typed languages. This paper describes an experiment that tries to enforce such a benefit for dynamically typed languages in an experimental setting. Four (quite artificial) tasks were designed from which the experimenters expected to measure a clear benefit for dynamically typed languages. However, only in two cases such a benefit could be measured. What is even more interesting is that two other tasks (again, explicitly designed to show a benefit for dynamically typed languages) showed the opposite.