http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1oi8wd/ruby_is_a_dying_language/ccs8yr8

Am 16.10.2013 00:15, schrieb Walter Bright:
>
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1oi8wd/ruby_is_a_dying_language/ccs8yr8
>
>

Agree.

While I do like dynamic languages for prototyping and small applications, I came to the conclusion they don't scale in the enterprise.

Plus with type inference, specially in the ML family, there is hardly any difference in terms of succinctness and the static languages are more tooling friendly.



--
Paulo

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 03:15:45PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> 
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1oi8wd/ruby_is_a_dying_language/ccs8yr8

It's interesting how compile times seem to always crop up in discussions about static vs. dynamic typing, even though it's really an orthogonal issue. I think D is a winner in this area (good job with the fast compile times, Walter!).


T

-- 
Meat: euphemism for dead animal. -- Flora

an excellent post, thanks for linking it Walter

the relative weakness of dynamic-typed tools is compounded by the fact that they tend to be used to build monolithic applications, typical of what might emerge from rails, php etc. you take the whole ball of mud or nothing. with no types to define the "rules of engagement", management of the interior of the application becomes lore-oriented...i.e. application lifetime job security for the original developer.

but its also important to put dynamic tools in their proper context. in the mid-90s they vastly accelerated many industrial coding chores. they had their time, but I believe that time is over.

On Tue, 15 Oct 2013 15:15:45 -0700
Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> 
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1oi8wd/ruby_is_a_dying_language/ccs8yr8
> 

Totally agree. 90+% of the argument for dynamic languages is "getting shit done", and yet they ultimately *create* work: More unittests, more roadblocks optimizing for memory/speed, and (the biggest IMO) much more debugging due to statically-checkable errors being silently converted into hidden bugs.

More of my notes on the dynamic "getting shit done" emperor having no clothes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6530465

http://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/why-i-hate-python-or-any-dynamic-language-really

On Tue, 15 Oct 2013 15:15:45 -0700, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

>
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1oi8wd/ruby_is_a_dying_language/ccs8yr8
>

+1

This is why I claw my eyes out every time I have to work with JavaScript.
This is why I find statically typed languages to so much more powerful for the work I do.

We need more D...

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/

On Tue, 15 Oct 2013 15:15:45 -0700
Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> 
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1oi8wd/ruby_is_a_dying_language/ccs8yr8
> 

OMG, I just noticed that's a reddit for a comment on hacker news.

I can't wait to see a comment in that reddit get it's own posting back over on hacker news :)

Silly Web 2.0...

On Tuesday, 15 October 2013 at 23:53:06 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 03:15:45PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
>> 
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1oi8wd/ruby_is_a_dying_language/ccs8yr8
>
> It's interesting how compile times seem to always crop up in discussions
> about static vs. dynamic typing, even though it's really an orthogonal
> issue. I think D is a winner in this area (good job with the fast
> compile times, Walter!).
>
>
> T

C and C++ are the ones to blame here.

Before they were ubiquitous, there were already compilers in the Pascal family that were quite fast.

Turbo Pascal always compiled within a few seconds and it did compile the desired module and all related dependencies.

However many young developers only know C and C++ as languages with native compilers, hence the common fallacy compilers are slow.

--
Paulo

On Tuesday, 15 October 2013 at 22:31:06 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 16.10.2013 00:15, schrieb Walter Bright:
>>
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1oi8wd/ruby_is_a_dying_language/ccs8yr8
>>
>>
>
> Agree.
>
> While I do like dynamic languages for prototyping and small applications, I came to the conclusion they don't scale in the enterprise.
>
(...)

Haven't tried Ruby, but I switched from Python to D because of static typing and speed back in 2007.

Why on earth should
  someVariable = 1
  # And then in some seldom-executed branch..
  somevariable = 2
give me hard to track bugs?
Even lua requires you to say "I'm creating a *new* variable now".

And a compiler that doesn't do simple optimizations?
  for x in range(0,10):
    i = x*x
    # do something with i

^ - might be painfully slow. You should of course code like a compiler and create i outside the loop!

And no types means I have to read the source for every method to see what types it actually expects.
Dynamic typing does not mean you don't have types to care about, it just means the types are hidden from sight and cause bugs at runtime. I will never again code in a dynamic language if I can avoid it. All the "advantages" of dynamic typing simply doesn't exist for anything other than small/trivial programs in my experience.

No.. Give me a language that catches obvious bugs at compile-time, makes code self-documenting and doesn't let me worry about performance.

Of course.. It might just be that I don't "get" dynamic typing :)

On 2013-10-16 02:45, Adam Wilson wrote:

> +1
>
> This is why I claw my eyes out every time I have to work with JavaScript.
> This is why I find statically typed languages to so much more powerful
> for the work I do

One big difference between Ruby and JavaScript is that when something fails in Ruby you'll get an exception. But with JavaScript it just silently fails and all your scripts on the site dies.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg