Do static type systems improve the maintainability of software systems? An empirical study

Abstract

Static type systems play an essential role in contemporary programming languages. Despite their importance, whether static type systems influence human software development capabilities remains an open question. One frequently mentioned argument for static type systems is that they improve the maintainability of software systems - an often used claim for which there is no empirical evidence. This paper describes an experiment which tests whether static type systems improve the maintainability of software systems. The results show rigorous empirical evidence that static type are indeed beneficial to these activities, except for fixing semantic errors. © 2012 IEEE.