Why Ruby?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/21/10 2:38 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> On 13/12/2010 15:49, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> 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.
>
>
> Ah, hold on a second. I agree the talk was rude and unprofessional (not
> that it was meant to be either), but I disagree it was sexist or
> offensive to women. Looking at the comment in question, "having your
> balls fondled at the airport", it's simply something that you cannot
> convey with anywhere the same meaning in a gender-neutral way ("having
> your gonads fondled at the airports"?... "having your genitals fondled
> at the airport"?... "having your crotch fondled at the airport"?...)

You presuppose there's a need to stick with the original metaphor. There 
are many good metaphors to use, and there are a lot of good jokes around 
the "porn scanners".

> For better or worse, "balls" has become a metaphor for braveness,
> boldness, power, recklessness, (or a combination therefore), and has
> even been applied to women some times ("does she have the balls to do
> that?").

There are a lot of actually good jokes around that topic. I think this 
one, for example, is not gross at all: when describing the shortcomings 
of iterators, I mentioned "you have to have a pair to do anything". I 
delivered that with a straight face and it was really interesting to see 
the audience slowly getting the doublespeak and starting to laugh with 
various latencies. I am subjective but I think that one is firmly on the 
opposite side of a thin line than the "fondled balls" joke.


Andrei