From: jstern@... (Josh Stern)
Date: 2000-12-14T01:40:02+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7156] Re: Ruby in the US

John G. Morony <jm1710@yahoo.com> wrote:
>--- Josh Stern <jstern@foshay.citilink.com> wrote:

>> I personally believe that some form of strong typing
>> is invaluable
>> for large projects, but it makes quick development
>> much slower,
>> so Ruby is potentially a great compliment to
>> strongly typed
>> languages just for that reason.  But it would also
>> be nice
>> to have flexible facilities for typing and 'design
>> by contract'
>> that operate at run time in Ruby when in 'debug
>> mode', and
>> have little or no overhead when in normal mode -
>> some
>> run time device that is, say, comparable to the
>> assert() macro
>> in C.  I just started thinking about Ruby two weeks
>> ago, and just
>> got your excellent book last weekend, so I'm not
>> qualified to
>> say what the best way is to implement that in Ruby
>> (perhaps
>> a mixin for adding extra type info and argument
>> signatures
>> to functions??).

>This discussion sort of reminds me of an episode of
>The Simpsons where KrustyLu Studios is conducting a
>focus group of children trying to figure out how to
>make the "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoon more appealing
>to kids.  After presenting two opposing views, the
>kids want both of them.  "So what you're saying is
>that you want a realistic, down-to-earth show full of
>magic robots from outer-space."

If that oblique commentary was meant to suggest that I'm
suggesting something which is absurdly difficult or
implausible, then I disagree.  If it was meant to
say that different (Turing complete) languages make 
different tradeoffs in terms of what they make it
easy to do, then of course that is common knowledge.

-= Josh