Hacker News Reader

Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

But as I mentioned the downside of this is that any mistakes don't become evident until at runtime. While the python way has the same problem (they're not compiled languages after all), by inlining to the existing source there's less changes for divergence to happen.

View on HN

Remember this is designed by companies that already have existing, large, ruby codebases. For them, it makes a lot of sense to be able to incrementally add typing without having to make changes to the underlying code itself.

You can do both. Python allows for external .pyi files, for situations where you can't modify the underlying library (for example: it's written in C). There are tons of them: https://github.com/python/typeshed, but you can still add types to new code inline.

You can, but clearly the people designing this system have weighed the pros and cons and found that there would be more benefits to them to leave the source code unchanged.

Yeah, there was a ton of discussion on this in the Ruby bugtracker and at core meetings. Matz is very sensitive to breaking the language with Ruby 3 and the core team is doing their best to ensure an easy transition.

So, why would a company with different use case than average ruby users implement stuff in the core to confuse many ruby users?

That use case is not for most of us yet the way those companies with large code base goes into the core? I guess ruby itself already has a large code base, so it seems they got aligned but they forgot to align with the rest of the world.

You can run Python type check before runtime at the cost of start time, or better before GIT commit or push (Git Hooks)

Inline types are available as a feature of the Sorbet type checker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com