From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@...>
Date: 2002-09-26T23:34:41+09:00
Subject: Re: adding overload to ruby

Hi Dave,

I think you know that "large scale software development" usually implies a
big team of people.  For a single-person development, no matter how large
the code is, Ruby will be fine, even without private variables, if the
person is really good and disciplined in writing code.

For a large team, the story is different.  I don't want the whole project
goes awry just because a person has a pointer error.  (In this regard Java
is much better, because there is no pointer).  Do you really think that we
can assemble 100 people now to write a single, large, Ruby application, 
and not expecting performance and bug problems?

Regards,

Bill
============================================================================
Dave Thomas <Dave@pragmaticprogrammer.com> wrote:
> 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.