From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2007-06-16T02:05:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Nube

On 15.06.2007 18:30, John Joyce wrote:
> 
> On Jun 15, 2007, at 7:04 AM, Bill Man wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> The concept of Dynamically Typed Languages has peaked my interest.
>> However, I have spent sometime trying to find what problem they exactly
>> solve.  Can anyone tell me:
>>
>> - What problems do dynamically typed languages such as Ruby solve?
>> - What is the business proposition for using a dynamic language such as
>> Ruby over Java / C#?
>> - What kinds of things can be better with dynamic languages such as
>> Ruby?
>>
>> Thank you so much for your help.  I have been searching the web for a
>> while and I haven't been able to find anything.
>>
>> -- 
>> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>>
> Dynamic typing itself is not such a big deal, but it does mean less 
> keyboarding, more concise code that is generally more readable.
> Dynamic typing allows more duck typing and introspection.
> You can try to send a message to an object. If it can do it, it will try.
> But you can actually ask the object if it can do something before doing it.
> Objective-C can also do this because it's got a bit of a runtime
> But also, you get (sometimes arbitrary) language rules that can be useful.
> In practice, it just makes some things more convenient with automagic 
> type conversions.
> puts 5
> will actually convert the Fixnum 5 to a string for you.

While I agree to the rest I would not attribute this example to dynamic 
typing.  The same is possible (and is actually used) in Java because 
there (similarly to Ruby) toString() is a method of Object (the root 
class of the class hierarchy).

Kind regards

	robert