From: adamon@... (Damon)
Date: 2002-11-19T06:29:34+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyConf 2002 Slides for FreeRIDE Presentation

"Rich Kilmer" <rich@infoether.com> wrote in message news:<002501c28eb5$45644860$> 
> I must say Idea (Intellij) _IS_ the best thing since sliced bread for
> Java.  After a year of NOT doing Java devt (after 6 full-time Java
> years) I had to go back to it.  If it wasn't for Idea, I don't think I
> would have survived.  Its quite amazing what one can do with a
> statically typed language.  Which brings me to what Gavin said.  Ruby is
> quite usable and lots of the crap that Java forces you to do manually,
> Ruby does for you.  But without static typing we may be somewhat
> limited...time will tell

Can you expound on this a little?  What are the major benefits of
static-typing?  I've programmed in statically-typed languages for a
long time, and felt liberated when I switched to Ruby and Smalltalk. 
There have been long debates about this issue before, with advocates
of dynamically-typed languages claiming that static-typing (in
imperative programming, not in functional languages) is oversold, and
that the benefits of compile-time type hecking are outweighed by the
limitations of code-factoring and the bother of having to write
boilerplate code in order to appease the type-checker.  I'm interested
in this alternate perspective, especially in regard to Java.

Thanks,

Damon