From: Alexey Verkhovsky Date: 2008-02-08T04:50:36+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby type-safe? Ruby strongly/weakly typed? Ruby pitfalls? I'd take an issue with two statements in that article: > Lack of variable declarations ... makes a language a poor choice for development of large applications Bullshit. Ruby is great for building large apps of certain kind. At ThoughtWorks, we've done a few relatively big business apps in Ruby (20 man-years kind of big in one case), and I have yet to hear anyone from these teams argue that it was a bad choice of a language. These guys have some non-trivial amount of Ruby code, too: http://www.revolutionhealth.com/ Last I heard, they did not think it was a bad choice. Some caveats apply. A team has to have ingrained discipline around unit tests and continuous integration. Once you have that, compiler is just an extremely weak and limited form of unit testing. I know the arguments for static type systems - in practice, it's not that valuable. > Reflective and meta-programming features -- While these features can be very interesting in experimental or > research-type programming, they are generally poorly suited for business or large-scale application development Bullshit. These features are downright AWESOME in business or large-scale application development. They are what makes Ruby framework APIs so nice. Example: mock object libraries in Ruby are capable of mocking out individual methods on pretty much anything in the runtime. This capability alone prevents a ton of accidental design complexity in a typical business app. Again, you need team discipline to discourage clever coding for the sake of clever coding. -- Alexey Verkhovsky CruiseControl.rb [http://cruisecontrolrb.thoughtworks.com] RubyWorks [http://rubyworks.thoughtworks.com]