After working in Python and Ruby I don't think I could ever choose a dynamically typed language for a project with more than a few thousand lines. There's just a lot of safety, and documentation, you get cheaply when using static types.

Ruby has conventions and a big testing culture which helps mitigate a lot of those issues. I also work with Typescript and I see whole classes of bugs that could be avoided if everyone just stuck with conventions and best practices.

If you like Ruby and wish it had types, check out Crystal. It's basically Ruby with Go's concurrency model, and it's as fast as Go.

{Edit: repetition}

There’s languages like Python and Ruby and then there’s languages like Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Self or Clojure: if dev-time is runtime, you miss compile-time checks a lot less

Cue the "Dynamic Languages Fail At N Lines of Code" bikeshedding as if Facebook, AirBnB and Shopify never happened.

...and steal the Soups from NewtonScript on the way.

What are the soups?

Both Google and DuckDuckGo give me no results so an example would be appreciated.

(Hope I'm not caught up in a prototype joke :)

Chapter 11-7 of https://www.newted.org/download/manuals/NewtonProgrammerGuid... using the Self influenced language NewtonScript https://www.newted.org/download/manuals/NewtonScriptProgramL...

My impression of systems like soups/OpenDoc/component systems/etc is that they're doomed to failure because they don't respect Conway's law. The app model works because each app has its own development team and teams aren't directly editing other teams' data.

They don't have the proper expertise and will break something, because it's not possible to enforce data consistency well enough. (Apple's modern OO database is called CoreData, has a pedigree from WebObjects, and its consistency features are pretty hard to use in practice.)

Soups and OpenDoc have no actual relation. Soups is a object file system and OpenDoc was a component system. CoreData is a poor successor to NeXT's EOF. I so miss EOF.

The only connection to editing someone else's data was the ability to add fields to soups for things like Contacts which allowed an easy expansion. Given how many programs on UNIX can alter each other's data, I don't agree with Conway in the context of the file system or soup.

"Data in Newton is stored in object-oriented databases known as soups."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton#Data_storage

time to dust it off and sell it as new ?

Yeah - I think the kids are ready for that.

rebrand it `selfie`