Re:Stripe is building a Ruby typechecker
by eropple on Sunday June 03, 2018 @07:35PM
(#17223153)
Those Scotsmen are pretty untrue, huh?
The claim is pretty facially silly at a glance besides, though. You literally don't know the fields and methods, to say nothing of what they actually give you, on a Ruby object without opening either the code or pulling up Pry and doing `ls`. Which I have done, often enough, to fail rather stunningly to miss doing so when in Kotlin or when using TypeScript. Checked that one? Good news--now you get to drill down into the next one, and the next one. I hope that isn't coming from another library, too, 'cause jumping from library to library in Ruby or Python is a chore. And even if not? God help you if you're using ActiveRecord, I hope you enjoy scanning your database migrations or describing tables just to learn method names.
It is a bad scene. And don't get me wrong; I like Ruby quite a lot. But I won't make excuses for it.
Personally, with the actual tooling available to modern systems, I write TypeScript much, much faster--we're talking probably twice as fast--than I do even ES6, which I otherwise quite like. And TypeScript can't even assert whether something is a whole number or not, unlike better languages. It has replaced Ruby for me on the strength of that alone.
The claim is pretty facially silly at a glance besides, though. You literally don't know the fields and methods, to say nothing of what they actually give you, on a Ruby object without opening either the code or pulling up Pry and doing `ls`. Which I have done, often enough, to fail rather stunningly to miss doing so when in Kotlin or when using TypeScript. Checked that one? Good news--now you get to drill down into the next one, and the next one. I hope that isn't coming from another library, too, 'cause jumping from library to library in Ruby or Python is a chore. And even if not? God help you if you're using ActiveRecord, I hope you enjoy scanning your database migrations or describing tables just to learn method names.
It is a bad scene. And don't get me wrong; I like Ruby quite a lot. But I won't make excuses for it.
Personally, with the actual tooling available to modern systems, I write TypeScript much, much faster--we're talking probably twice as fast--than I do even ES6, which I otherwise quite like. And TypeScript can't even assert whether something is a whole number or not, unlike better languages. It has replaced Ruby for me on the strength of that alone.