Why Ruby?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/13/10 9:11 AM, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
> On 12/13/2010 09:08 AM, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
>> Yes I am :-)
>
> Since you were the Descent author, I wonder how you feel about Ruby's
> lack of static typing. In the video, the speaker bashes type safety as
> "having your balls fondled at the airport", that is, security theater
> that doesn't accomplish much.

By the way, I couldn't stop cringing at the distasteful, male-centric 
sexual jokes that the talk is peppered with. Wonder if there was any 
woman in the audience, and how she might have felt. And this is not a 
ghetto rant - it's the keynote of a major Ruby conference! (And I'm 
definitely not a prude.) Am I alone in thinking that this is not what 
our metier should evolve into?

Besides, the argument in favor of dynamic typing is one of the most 
disingenuous around. C is a language for consenting adults that gives 
you that kind of freedom. If we took the speaker's arguments to their 
logical conclusion, Ruby would be a language for people who don't care 
about correctness, despise efficiency, and have contempt for modularity.

> But that misses many of the good features that come with it, especially
> in an IDE like Eclipse: code completion, find declaration, find
> references, rename refactoring, and compiler checked documentation.
>
> Ruby is also one of the slowest languages around, and I'm sure some of
> that is due to the "freedom" it gives you, "freedom" being what the
> speaker calls no static typing and monkey patching.

Clearly focusing on one thing is easier when other concerns are reduced. 
D code has a lot more to worry about than Ruby code. That being said, 
I'm very glad about this discussion - we stand to learn from a variety 
of languages including Ruby.


Andrei