Why Ruby?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:ie5fe7$2df7$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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.

Not much of a danger of that, there's probably about 10 female programmers 
in the world anyway. I see no problem catering a talk to the people who are 
actually there rather than the people you think should be there.

> 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?
>

I didn't watch the video, but the only problem I see with the example above 
is the absurdity of implying that static typing is a useless bother. But I'm 
the kind of guy who finds Richard Pryor's stand-up funny rather than 
offensive.