Miguel, I'm a little frustrated by the dynamic typing of Ruby as well, but you get used to it quickly. You might rather be interested in the scala language (http://www.scala-lang.org/) which keeps many of the useful constructs of ruby, but uses an even stronger typing system than java does. I'm still new to it, but I'm not sure it has many of the neat introspection properties of ruby that let you twist and bend the language. Also check out the Eclipse ruby plugin, which I just discovered and which makes the lack of typing easier to work with...