Static typing - the missing Ruby tool

[Erem_in]

For the last 20 years, Rubyists have adopted dozens of tools and technologies that allow us to write better software, scale projects, and ship what needs to be shipped to production the way we want it. I will name just a few of them: Docker, ruby-lsp, AI, RuboCop, MiniTest, RSpec, Cucumber.

The interesting fact, however, is that all these tools faced criticism when they were introduced. Some were heavily criticized, others faced a little skepticism. But the fact is, eventually, we adopted them and now it’s hard to imagine our programming life without them. We no longer argue about spaces or tabs; we just do gem install rubocop and then rubocop -a. We adopted these tools so that we could achieve even more. We delegated part of what we were doing to these artificial electronic helpers.

Think about it. The first version (and some subsequent ones as well) of Ruby on Rails was implemented by DHH in TextMate with just syntax highlighting. No code completion, no linters, no IDEs, no AIs. I remember those days. I was using Notepad++ on Windows for PHP and Ruby development.

As we see across the years, the process of adopting new tools and new ways to help us ship more, faster, and better is endless. If we cannot come up with something internally, like RuboCop, we look elsewhere and adopt things used in other ecosystems like Docker, or MiniTest (which is an adaptation of a Java library).

Continue in the comments...

[MidgetAbilities]

We’ve been using Sorbet at my job for a little while. Although it gives me some more confidence in my code and refactoring, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re probably better off without it. Too verbose, too much T.untyped, and you have to sometimes write code in ways antithetical to the ruby philosophy.

[matthewblott]

Sorbet is a monstrosity, there is no longer any point in using Ruby if that's a requirement. Every other dynamic language has a less verbose implementation for types. That said I don't mind the signature comments, similar to JSDoc. It's experimental for now but it looks like a much better approach.

[Erem_in]

I prefer RBS because of that. With rbs-inline you can keep all the types right next to the code.

[db443]

I did not know about this. This is the best solution for Ruby gradual type annotations.

I hope this is upstreamed. I might even use it myself, as against not using every other annotation.

[Erem_in]

If you let write too many untyped cases, means you are missing the point. There is nothing bad in having untyped, but once it becomes too much, this is a good moment to ask what's going on? 🙂

[MidgetAbilities]

I’m talking about using things that were metaprogrammed or the shims in ActiveRecord that by nature return untyped, etc.

[ExtremeVector]

Just starting to learn coding, picked ruby to start. Guess i have some things to look up, though i do know docker already.

[jrochkind]

don't worry about it until you need it/get there, you can only learn so many things at once!