[ruby-talk:15175] Re: Discussion on new Ruby features

Another Ruby Newbie weighs in.  I've only used Ruby a week, but I was 
beside myself with glee when I saw that somebody had finally put out a 
language besides SmallTalk that did NOT enforce type-rigidity.  I have 
always felt that a major part of the rubbery strength of SmallTalk came 
exactly from the lack of enforced type checking.

Sure, it's harder to debug if your brain cramps are not pointed out to 
you by a parser.  But look how useful Pascal was, with its zealous 
assumptions about purity and perfection in type enforcement (discarded 
as useless, because too many cases kept coming up where a little more 
imagination was needed than Pascal's model would allow).

I respect the fact that strict type control will allow for much better 
optimization, but I want badly to be able to explore the non-type-safe 
world a while and see if there are remarkable insights one can come to 
in this new territory.  Please, if you do add type-checking and 
constraints, make sure not to let them prohibit using the language with 
its current SmallTalkish freedom.
Let them be positively applied options, not default restrictions I have 
to fight
my way past yet again.  A programmer can supply their own type-safety 
when they want to already.


> Christian Szegedy wrote:
>
> > Dave Thomas wrote:
> >
> > I also depends on what you're trying to optimize. For example, in many
> > long running Ruby scripts, the major slowdown comes not from method
> > dispatching but rather from garbage collection (this should improve in
> > 1.7). Before we travel too far down a particular path, perhaps we
> > should we doing some experiments to see where optimization would have
> > the most effect.
> 
> Not so pragmatic, Dave! ;)
> 
> Speeding up gargbage collection is an important issue, but:
> The mark/sweep technique is linear in the allocated memory, therefore:
> Reducing the number of allocations clearly speeds up the garbage 
> collection. This could be a main issue after optimizing the collection
> itself. I think therefore, that my idea on the operators could speed 
> up a lot.
> 
> I don't think, that static typing information in Ruby script is only
> "a particular path". 
> 
> It has a lot of facets: code clearence,effectivnes, genericity,
> optimazibility,programming philosophy... I think, it is a most 
> serious issue. However, the later does it happen the harder will it
> be.
> 
> Please, think about it!
> 
> Best regards, Christian

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