This is a really poor comparison. How many people who know enough to judge these things believe that? I can understand that you’re rigorous in the empirical claims you accept here, but surely you can see that experienced software developers have somewhat more basis to make claims about type systems than random people do about homeopathy.
> or at least, the effect does not seem to be big
Fair enough! It’s probably not as big as testing or code review but I do think it exists. You mentioned the TypeScript study, it’s not like there’s no evidence for believing this like there is with homeopathy.
> So far, we've failed to show that static types reduce bugs, period.
I mean, how could they not? You still haven’t explained this part, except with vague allusions that the problems they catch are not the most common problems. I’ve explained how static types reduce bugs: by eliminating cases where you intend to handle a case and forget to. I’ll specify that I mean a type system with exhaustivity checking or narrowing with control flow (like TS or Kotlin). This is not an empirical argument, it’s a rational argument, and I still legitimately don’t understand what the flaw is. The way I see it, static type systems restrict operations on types to those known to be valid at compile time. In a sound type system and compiler, the resulting program is guaranteed not to make invalid operations on types at runtime. Dynamic programs are fully free to make invalid operations on types at runtime. Some number of bugs are caused by making invalid operations on types at runtime. Where are those bugs in a statically typed program, if they haven’t been eliminated?
