From: Bulat Ziganshin <bulatz@...>
Date: 2002-12-16T17:32:06+09:00
Subject: Re: help -- persuade my boss to adopt ruby

Hello Yukihiro,

Monday, December 16, 2002, 10:24:48 AM, you wrote:

YM> Did "corporate America" ask me something that I refuse?

can me and William Djaja Tjokroaminata say instead of them? :)  read:

YM> |concrete, i feel that Ruby is not strict enough and can't be compiled
YM> |for more or less fast execution.


YM> And finally, I couldn't find good balance between Ruby's goodness and
YM> what-you-called-strictness.  If you have any concrete feature
YM> proposal, I'm always open, as long as feature-added Ruby still remains
YM> being Ruby.

i see process of development of large application as prototyping w/o
type declarations, then "freezing" interfaces and adding
type-checking, pre- and post-conditions, huge comments and so on. then
process is repeated on a module-by-module basis

this is close to process used for C++/Java now and on this way i will
feel that our Ruby programs are better in all senses than programs
coded in old languages. only alternative to type checking i know is
unit testing but i don't have feeling whether it will be definitely
more reliable (and this leaves problem of fast execution to some other
mechanism)

in my experience, static typing is appropriate for 90% of function
prototypes/variable declarations and this is the common idiom used
even by Ruby developers (see Array.[] or Date.<=> for example - these
checks for types, not methods supported by object)

-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:bulatz@integ.ru