Apparently the JS name was selected and announced in partnership with Sun from the very beginning, and Sun had the copyright over both Java and JapaScript up until the acquisition by Oracle. I had no idea, but that makes perfect sense.
I've never understood the hatred for Teams. I don't particularly like Slack, and Teams (from my limited experience using it) doesn't seem that much worse.
Yeah, I understand that Option and Maybe aren't new, but they've only recently become popular. IIRC several of the studies use Java, which is certainly safer than C++ and is technically statically typed, but in my opinion doesn't do much to help ensure correctness compared to Rust, Swift, Kotlin, etc.
I don't know; I haven't caught up on the research over the past decade. But it's worth noting that this body of evidence is from before the surge in popularity of strongly typed languages such as Swift, Rust, and TypeScript. In particular, mainstream "statically typed" languages still had null values rather than Option or Maybe.
Partly because it's from 2014, so the modern static typing renaissance was barely starting (TypeScript was only two years old; Rust hadn't hit 1.0; Swift was mere months old). And partly because true evidence-based software research is very difficult (how can you possibly measure the impact of a programming language on a large-scale project without having different teams write the same project in different languages?) and it's rarely even attempted.
No, because the thing they are naming is "The Github Dictionary"; they're not applying scare-quotes to the word "dictionary" implying that what they've written is not really a "dictionary".
"Scare quotes" definitely precede Austin Powers, though that may have spurred a rise in popularity of the usage. (Also, "trashy people never saw Austin Powers" is honestly a pretty weird statement, IMO.)
That said, in this case, arguably the quotes are appropriate, because "the github dictionary" isn't something that happened (i.e. a headline), but a thing they've made up.
Definitely not gonna defend Microsoft's naming, let alone their versioning!