alt Hacker NewsIt's acceptable to state, without evidence, that functional programming and static typing make things more reliable.
But this isn't a falsifiable claim. We cannot possibly know if this is true or not.
- Not all of banking and telecom use functional programming or even static typing.
- Functional programming often leads to write-only incomprehensible code; the exact opposite of what you need to have a reliable system.
- There's no hard evidence that static typing improves reliability. Only vibes and feels.
Replies
> There's no hard evidence that static typing improves reliability.
I'm curious how you came to that conclusion?
https://pleiad.cl/papers/2012/kleinschmagerAl-icpc2012.pdf
https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journals/an-empirical-s...
> Functional programming often leads to write-only incomprehensible code; the exact opposite of what you need to have a reliable system.
In what language?
It improves reliability at compile time, certainly
> ... functional programming and static typing make things more reliable.
> But this isn't a falsifiable claim.
Saying "this isn't falsifiable" is a wild claim. Indeed the claim "functional programming and static typing make things more reliable" is falsifiable, as long as you admit a statistical understanding. The world is messy and experiments have noise, so what would you use if not statistics? Anecdotes?: no. Purely deductive methods?: no; we should not expect any single technique to be a silver bullet.
Good studies and analyses lay out a causal model and use strong methodologies for showing that some factor has a meaningful impact on some metric of interest. I recommend this as a starting point [1]
[1]: https://yanirseroussi.com/2016/05/15/diving-deeper-into-caus...
Citation needed.
Wait. This doesn’t make sense to me. Statically typed programming languages cannot be deployed nor can they run with a type error that happens at runtime. Untyped languages CAN run and error out with a type error AT runtime. The inevitable consequence of that truth is this:
In the spectrum of runtime errors statically typed languages mathematically and logically HAVE less errors. That by itself is the definition of more reliable. This isn’t even a scientific thing related to falsifiability. This comes from pure mathematical logic. In science nothing can be proven, things can only be falsified. But in math and logic things can be proven and it is provable that static types are more reliable than untyped.
It is definitely not vibes and feels. Not all of banking uses statically typed languages but they are as a result living with a less reliable system then the alternative and that is a logical invariant.
There are many reasons why someone would choose untyped over typed but reliability is not a reason why they would do this unless they are ignorant.