[ruby-core:74307] Re: Type systems for Ruby

On 03/14/2016 05:07 AM, NARUSE, Yui wrote:
> Matz says about Soft Typing in the Keynote, but he also says he want
> static type checking.
> (I personally think they are conflicted)

Well, you can get some static type checking out of soft typing based on 
what your program text lets you infer about the types. I don't have a 
good intuition of how far that goes for an expressive language like 
Ruby, but it's certainly possible.

> Type System is a tool to solve a problem.
> Matz says there's three expected problem for it:
> * performance
> * debug (compile time check)
> * documentation
>
> If you tackle this, you should decide what problem will you solve.
> Because Matz says and Ruby programmers are lazy, it is better if
> people doesn't need to write type.
> But it's must be useful in some portion.
> People can write type if it is really worth writing.
> You may need to find a best mix with optional typing.
>
> NOTE:
> Matz strongly objects to introduce any syntactic annotations to Ruby now.
> But he also says he don't forbid to embed annotations as comments (or rdoc).

Performance is neat, but I think debug and documentation go together and 
are more important, and those are the ones I would consider first. I 
agree that there should be a useful mix to be found involving optional 
typing, and probably (in line with typing as documentation) RDoc is the 
right place to make these annotations, if any.

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