Note, in particular, that there's a high confidence, true, but the claim is "picking language X reduces the chances for bugs by a tiny bit." To quote the abstract:
"It is worth noting that these modest effects arising from language de- sign are overwhelmingly dominated by the process factors such as project size, team size, and commit size. However, we hasten to caution the reader that even these modest effects might quite possibly be due to other, intangible process factors, e.g., the preference of certain personality types for functional, static and strongly typed languages."
Personally I like statically typed languages due to playing nicer with autocompletion and in-editor documentation. Every time people make claims about "upgrades being done when project compiles" I die a little inside.
Refactoring is the biggest reason to prefer static typing for me. I just love the ability to right-click -> "Rename", and know for sure that this is done correctly throughout the entire codebase, even if it's megabytes of convoluted code.
Yes, modern IDEs for dynamic languages can also do this 95% of the time via type inference. The problem is that you never know if this time it's going to be the other 5%. And dynamism tends to encourage clever hacks that make code less verbose, but also make it especially hard for any sort of automated tool to figure out - and those can lurk in corners people don't even remember are there.
Note, in particular, that there's a high confidence, true, but the claim is "picking language X reduces the chances for bugs by a tiny bit." To quote the abstract:
"It is worth noting that these modest effects arising from language de- sign are overwhelmingly dominated by the process factors such as project size, team size, and commit size. However, we hasten to caution the reader that even these modest effects might quite possibly be due to other, intangible process factors, e.g., the preference of certain personality types for functional, static and strongly typed languages."
Personally I like statically typed languages due to playing nicer with autocompletion and in-editor documentation. Every time people make claims about "upgrades being done when project compiles" I die a little inside.