From: Jay Levitt <jay+news@...>
Date: 2007-12-10T09:55:00+09:00
Subject: Re: How much would variable declarations in Ruby make you wince?

On Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:51:17 GMT, Just Another Victim of the Ambient
Morality wrote:

>     The two most popular sources of bugs for me when programming in Ruby 
> are:
> 
> 1)  Passing the wrong object as a parameter to a method.
> 2)  Accidentally creating a new variable.
> 
>     Unfortunately for me, very little can be done about my first point.  I 
> understand and enjoy the power of duck-typing, which specifically allows me 
> to exercise this bug.
>     However, something can be done about the second point.  Let me exemplify 
> the problem:

I suspect that both #1 and #2 are because you're not doing TDD/BDD.

When I first came to Ruby from statically-typed languages, I had exactly
the same problem, for exactly that reason.  I *constantly* made typos.

Then I started playing with RSpec, and writing all my specs first, and -
magically - all those types of bugs disappeared (or, rather, were caught
the minute I clicked "save", thanks to ZenTest's autotest).

The proof, to me, was that I've recently been on a contract that took me
back to PL/I - one of the more restrictive statically-typed languages.
Wouldn't you know it: Nearly every time I tried to compile, I found at
least one mistyped variable name.

Go figure.
-- 
Jay Levitt                |
Boston, MA                | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://www.jay.fm         | - Kristoffer