News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Stripe is building a Ruby typechecker by sandstrom on Sunday June 03, 2018 @06:46AM (#17218949)
Interesting! Anyone with insight into the ruby core team know if Ruby may add typing (optional or mandatory) in the future?
Re:Stripe is building a Ruby typechecker by lewisinc on Sunday June 03, 2018 @05:00PM (#17221985)
Matz has talked about it as an opt-in. I think his opinion is to not force people to adopt it if they won't enjoy it or their productivity will be hampered by it.
Re:Stripe is building a Ruby typechecker by griffinheart on Monday June 04, 2018 @12:58AM (#17224783)
Was at the Kaigi and on the opening keynote Matz talked a bit about it. He doesn't really support adding it since he feels like in 20/30+ years, advances in technology will make writing types "obsolete".
Re:Stripe is building a Ruby typechecker by quelltext on Monday June 04, 2018 @06:04AM (#17226232)
It's a weird argument. If it's not necessary in 30 years (I doubt it because some of the type inference issues are simply undecidable, and that in much simpler languages already), then the language can just opt to ignore type annotations or merely check their consistency. Having them is great either way for the benefit of documentation.

My take is he doesn't really like (or "get") types and feels protective of his language, which is fair. I think Python made an interesting choice here, i.e. provide syntax for types without semantics. The drawback there is potential fragmentation on type system semantics.