Why Ruby?

[Bruno Medeiros]

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"?...)
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?").

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer