From: Dan Sugalski <dan@...>
Date: 2002-12-17T05:59:25+09:00
Subject: Re: help -- persuade my boss to adopt ruby

At 3:36 PM +0900 12/16/02, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
>concrete, i feel that Ruby is not strict enough and can't be compiled
>for more or less fast execution.

This is very much incorrect. It's certainly possible to do things to 
speed up the execution of dynamically typed languages, and there's 
been a lot of research into how. Ruby execution could, with the 
appropriate amount of concentrated programmer talent thrown at it, 
see speedups of an order of magnitude, perhaps two in some cases. 
This is a *very* non-trivial thing to do, however, and something I 
don't think any single person, no matter how good, could pull off. 
Give Matz four or five scary-smart people and a year and you could 
see it. If you don't have them, perhaps it would be best if you 
backed off some, as it's reasonably apparent you're not sufficiently 
familiar with the field to make a good judgement as to the problem or 
its solutions.

Dynamic typing also has a number of advantages that make it better 
suited for several classes of problems than a statically typed 
language such as C or Java. The cost that dynamic typing imposes is 
the price you pay for that better suitability--it's an engineering 
tradeoff like any other, as no feature is free.
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk