[Paul Brannan]:
> Writing in a static-typed language does require more boilerplate code,
> but certainly not on the order of 850% more.  The reason I write less
> code in Ruby is because of Ruby's standard library more so than it is
> because Ruby is dynamicly typed.
> 
> I'd be interested in seeing a comparison of C++ templates (or a similar
> mechanism) with type-generic code in a dynamicly-typed language. 

Well, this is just one datapoint, but at least it is something empiric.  I
recently implemented a (not very large, but at least non-trivial) program in
both C++ and Ruby. The C++ program used STL for collections, and other nice
programming techniques.

The result (with comments stripped):

	890    2472   26071 c_src
	619    1497   14090 ruby_src

So the C-code was 85 % longer (43 % as many lines).

On the other hand, if I hadn't written the Ruby version first, the C code would
probably not have been as well designed. ;)

// Niklas