> [...] I'm a little tired of being told my personal anecdotal evidence is not sufficient to conclude that water is wet.
The problem is, other people with just as many credentials as you have the opposite experience. From an outsider's perspective, two people with equal authority say opposite things, what can they possibly do except an independent study?
Also, note that there's a reason anecdotal evidence is not always reliable. E.g. the famous story about fighter pilots and the "regression to the mean" hypothesis.
I suppose what they can do is write some code and figure out where their specific situation lands them on the Static Typing is good/bad spectrum.
In this scenario, I honestly don't think it matters whose objectively right. Software is not a clean, normalized and organized set of use cases after all, maybe static typing works for person X and doesn't for person Y because of their background, or preferences, or codebase requirements, and so on.
Maybe one day we can conclusively prove that on aggregate static-typing/{insertThingHere} is overall less buggy, but even if we did, it'll still change depending on circumstances.
The problem is, other people with just as many credentials as you have the opposite experience. From an outsider's perspective, two people with equal authority say opposite things, what can they possibly do except an independent study?
Also, note that there's a reason anecdotal evidence is not always reliable. E.g. the famous story about fighter pilots and the "regression to the mean" hypothesis.