Doubts about the positive impact of static type systems on programming tasks in single developer projects - An empirical study

Abstract

Static type systems (see e.g. [6]) are one of the major topics in research, teaching, as well as in industry. However, while type systems are well-studied from a theoretical perspective, there is hardly any knowledge about the impact of static type systems on practical programming with a programming language. In literature, several arguments advocate the use of static type systems (see for example [1]); at the same time, there are arguments which advocate the use of dynamic type systems (see e.g. [8]): it is unclear which arguments describe observable phenomena and which do not. Here, empirical methods [5] could help. It turns out, though, that the impact of static type systems is rarely studied using empirical methods. Following the research method of empirical software engineering, this paper introduces an experiment that studies the impact of static type systems. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.