From: Dave Thomas <Dave@...>
Date: 2002-09-26T23:09:19+09:00
Subject: Re: adding overload to ruby

William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@z.glue.umd.edu> writes:

> We all know the facts that large-scale software, including Ruby  
> itself, currently is almost always written in C, C++, or Java.  (Yes,
> probably there are others, such as Eiffel, but I don't know.)  And we see
> that these "large-scale software" languages all have type
> declarations.  We all know the benefits of type declaration, although it
> usually increases the development time.

I guess I'm not one of the 'we' you mention. I used to be, but I'm not
any more. I've discovered that typing issues are rarely the things
that cause bugs in my code. My bug rate in Ruby is no worse that it
was in Java, but I can code it way, way faster.

I just delivered the first release of a Ruby web application. I just
checked: 26824 source lines of code, developed in 8 weeks. This isn't
a large system in terms of usage, but at the same time it has been
used: it currently has over 5,000 registered users, and has clocked
135,359 transactions to date. I've had one production bug (I forgot to
install a style file). There's no way I could have written this is
Java, or any other language I know.

Every now and then, particularly when refactoring, it would be nice to
have type information encoded in the source, but I'm finding that
consistent naming conventions work almost as well. And the benefits of
_not_ having typing greatly outweigh the minor inconveniences.


Cheers


Dave