On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 08:29:34 +0900, Curt Sampson <cjs / cynic.net>
wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Robert Klemme wrote:
>> "Curt Sampson" <cjs / cynic.net > schrieb im Newsbeitrag
>> news:Pine.NEB.4.61.0501271018220.2459 / angelic-vtfw.cvpn.cynic.net...
>>> But I would propose actually changing the language to better
>>> support this sort of thing.
>> I opt against this: not every good or useful language feature
>> must be present in Ruby.
> No. Ruby could end up being a second-rate language instead.

It could be, but that seems to be unlikely -- unless non-feature
features are added to it (such as static typing).

[...]


> Lisp, on the other hand, in all of its various forms, is still one
> of the most powerful programming languages in the world, and is
> still being used to write new systems more than forty-five years
> after its invention.

...and it doesn't have static typing.

> Ruby asked me to give up a lot of useful type checking in order to
> get duck typing. It does not have to do so. If it continues to do
> so, one day a language is going to come along that offers what
> Ruby does but doesn't make this compromise, and people will start
> switching, just as people are now switching from Perl to Ruby
> because Perl doesn't "need" a better syntax for OO work.

Frankly, I don't see any advantage to static typing. None. I find
that I hate any language that requires me to type stuff just to help
the compiler -- static typing and such type checking is NOT for us,
the programmers, but for the compiler.

Frankly, adding static typing or even type hinting to Ruby will
*reduce* Ruby's flexibility. How? Because people will use it; the
moment that some fool library writer decides that they want
something that *is* an IO object, it will no longer be possible to
pass in a StringIO object (it doesn't inherit from IO, and IO isn't
a module) or even a specially modified Array or String or some other
object.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin / halostatue.ca