Very little of research in programming languages is anything like “We tried it out on a bunch of developers and the data support our conclusion that ...”.
PL is not an empirical science in that sense, it's more like mathematics. So your initial intuition about type safety, etc. is right on the money—that's the academic side of it.
PL is not an empirical science in that sense, it's more like mathematics. So your initial intuition about type safety, etc. is right on the money—that's the academic side of it.