I’ve noticed the same thing. Large amount of resistance to consider anything else but the status quo.
However, I refuse to believe that there are people out there who are so set in their ways that they wouldn’t consider an alternative. Rather, there needs to be a very high upside for some people.
I can’t help with data scientists, quants and data engineers, but here’s something for managers.
I work in proprietary trading, and I’ve been tasked with assessing the cost of production bugs. Every bug in production costs two things:
- A loss in case we’ve traded the wrong thing;
- An opportunity cost; the loss of the money we would have made, had the bug not happened.
We have a failure rate that’s pretty low. I can’t give the numbers exactly, but think in units of bugs / month. And yet, in the past year, just in terms of Python’s TypeError and related errors, i.e. things that static typing would have caught at compile-time, we could have saved something on the order of person-years. Assuming that new bugs pop up as new ones get squashed – which is likely given that we keep expanding to new products and markets --, there is a tangible financial incentive to consider static typing. In fact, we have been experimenting with Haskell for this purpose, and now we have firm numbers backing our decision.