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
