Re: another take on hackers and painters

[Zooko <address@hidden>]

 Pascal Costanza <costanza@web.de> wrote:
>
> + If personal experience is not the right measure then the whole 
> computer science community sucks very badly. Where are the empirical 
> studies that try to assess whether features like static typing have an 
> actual positive effect in practice?

I'm given to understand that once upon a time intuitions, anecdotal reports, 
and untested or even untestable explanations were the norm in the science of 
psychology, but that nowadays if you include a sentence like "Neuroses tend to 
increase in severity with age." in your psychology paper, you had also better 
include justification in the form of some statistically justified empirical 
data or a reference to same.

Hopefully someday this will be true of programming language development -- 
sentences such as "Adding a static type system to ThingLang will improve 
documentation, maintenance, and reliability." will come with quantitative and 
reproduceable evidence behind them, instead of being accepted because of the 
shared intuitions of the authors and readers.

Regards,

Zooko

http://zooko.com/
         ^-- under re-construction: some new stuff, some broken links