Re: Is strong typing worth the cost?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

I recall reading about the study several years ago as I was persuing an MBA.
IIRC, the study involved looking at a number of companies that didn't have
computerization in any significant way and then they invested large sums of
money to put computers in place. By looking at, say, a case where a company
invests $5m on computerization and looking at its output per employee, you
would expect that this investment ought to result in more output per
employee in some manner or it wasn't worth it. Apparently, the numbers
didn't get better and the theory goes that employees did things like spend
time putting together fancy, typeset memos where they used to just
hand-scrawl something and show it to the xerox machine. So its not a forgone
conclusion that computers make us more productive. And its not obvious that
the reason for lack of productivity gains is because all the companies
studied used Microsoft products. :-)

Of course a counter argument is that there are just a bunch of things we
couldn't do without computers (such as design better products with computer
simulations, etc) and so computers are just the price of admission if you
want to be competitive. But that doesn't mean the original study isn't
important. It goes to show that you really need to look at things carefully
to determine if they are an actual benefit.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Wes Groleau" <wesgroleau@despammed.com> wrote in message
news:3CCFFE11.F0CBE6FE@despammed.com...
>
> It's awfully hard to control all the variables.
> For example, there's a big difference between a year of
>