Re:Marten, a Crystal web framework that makes building web a...
by wheels on Monday October 31, 2022 @05:39AM
(#33403640)
It's not just at runtime -- again, a common case for me (I maintain Ruby, Java, and C++ codebases that are 15 years old) are in major framework upgrades.
I've got Rails apps that were written for Rails 2 that are now on Rails 6. A Rails upgrade is a multi-day, multi-person effort. A Qt upgrade is usually about an hour for one person.
My argument isn't that C++ on the whole is saner than Ruby. There are advantages to both. (Though, to be honest, refactoring Java, which I otherwise dislike, is positively sublime.) My argument is that with something like Crystal where you basically write Ruby and get the advantages of C++ and Java, that that's a net win.
The other part of my argument is that the sum total of tests + code for Ruby isn't significantly more concise than just using a statically typed language with more minimal tests. They're really pretty close. And I personally find the roteness of static typing less mentally taxing than having to imagine all code paths in a duck-typed function.
I genuinely believe that the success of duck typed languages is their support of fast iteration for cowboy coding. I'm wholly convinced that for long lived code bases, static typing makes far more sense. But that's why I'm happy to see languages that support it with minimal to trivial cognitive overhead.
I've got Rails apps that were written for Rails 2 that are now on Rails 6. A Rails upgrade is a multi-day, multi-person effort. A Qt upgrade is usually about an hour for one person.
My argument isn't that C++ on the whole is saner than Ruby. There are advantages to both. (Though, to be honest, refactoring Java, which I otherwise dislike, is positively sublime.) My argument is that with something like Crystal where you basically write Ruby and get the advantages of C++ and Java, that that's a net win.
The other part of my argument is that the sum total of tests + code for Ruby isn't significantly more concise than just using a statically typed language with more minimal tests. They're really pretty close. And I personally find the roteness of static typing less mentally taxing than having to imagine all code paths in a duck-typed function.
I genuinely believe that the success of duck typed languages is their support of fast iteration for cowboy coding. I'm wholly convinced that for long lived code bases, static typing makes far more sense. But that's why I'm happy to see languages that support it with minimal to trivial cognitive overhead.