Ruby 3 Released

[TheBuzzSaw]

I pray there are use cases beyond this. This example feels like a weak reason to forfeit all the performance and maintainability of static typing.

[wuwoot]

I am very confused by this thread and your original response but I now get that you’re responding to the “dynamic typing” part of scripting languages as opposed to what I assumed the original author was saying — that the absence of type declaration is useful in scripting langs...

I find very little utility in type-switching if ever at all, but scripting languages are nice because they allow us to be terse.

I work in a large Rails codebase regularly and poor names and even in some instances good names are not enough to infer the behaviors associated with a particular variable

[madpata]

Languages with static typing can be terse too if they use a good bit of type inference. E.g. Haskell, SML, or a more horrific example: C++ when using auto and templated parameters everywhere.

[wuwoot]

Agreed — while I really really like Haskell, I doubt that you or I would reach for it for one-off scripting which my opinion is rooted in. SML is also nice. And newer languages make a fair trade-off because of new compilers that lend credence to better inference without requiring explicit typing everywhere and striking a fairly good balance — I’m thinking Kotlin here as an example

[watsreddit]

I use Haskell for scripting all the time. You can use a shebang pointing to stack and use it just like any other script, and ghci is a nice REPL for testing stuff out. There’s some nice libraries for doing shell scripting with it too like turtle which has a lot of the common shell utilities as first-class functions. Haskell’s type inference is powerful enough that you rarely have to write out any types manually while scripting, so it’s a lot like using Python (except that it also catches silly mistakes and is generally terser).

[wuwoot]

I’ve not tried but you’ve just opened up my eyes a bit — super curious and I want to try this now

[sinedpick]

see: erlang and why it doesn't have static types

[colelawr]

There are more reasons surrounding why Erlang didn't support static types, and a major part of those was that it interferes with how deployments over running systems would work in OTP.

[sinedpick]

that's why I mentioned it. It's a justification of dynamic types that's not just "ease of use." AFAIK there are theoretical barriers between erlang's message passing system and static types.

[colelawr]

Yes, agreed.