I’ve definitely seen you argue along the lines of “it hasn’t been implemented in Java, therefore nobody uses it and we can’t tell if it’s a good idea or not” before. Forgive me for assuming this followed from that.
> You can't come up with a claim, try and fail to support it time and again, and keep asserting it as if it's obviously true, despite the evidence.
But “correctness” of itself is pretty nebulous. If we define it as whether or not the program conforms to one’s intentions with writing it, I would expect static types alone not to show a significant difference in correctness. Probably formal methods do but they have much higher overhead.
However, in terms of eliminating patterns which are literally never correct, like dereferencing null pointers, violating resource lifetimes, or calling methods that don’t exist, static typing can in fact eliminate those patterns.
> the claim that programs in OCaml are more correct than programs in Clojure
My full-time job is Elixir so I know full well the consequences of maintaining large codebases in dynamic languages. I would switch to OCaml in a heartbeat if it ran on the BEAM! I want to know that I am calling functions correctly within a node when the module can be resolved at compile time. This is a really basic thing to want, and not one that dynamic languages can offer. The qualitative difference is similar to that between structured and unstructured programming: I can actually do local reasoning about a function without having to check all the call sites or write a lot of defensive tests.
This is an obvious advantage, and on some level I don’t really care if it contributes to formal correctness or not because it would make my job easier.
