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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: Optional Static Typing, Redux
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Or type annotations. Or whatever you want to call them. From Artima, discussing the use practical advantages of Scala over Ruby:
Alex Payne: I’d definitely want to hammer home what Steve said about typing. As our system has grown, a lot of the logic in our Ruby system sort of replicates a type system, either in our unit tests or as validations on models. I think it may just be a property of large systems in dynamic languages, that eventually you end up rewriting your own type system, and you sort of do it badly. You’re checking for null values all over the place. There’s lots of calls to Ruby’s kind_of? method, which asks, “Is this a kind of User object? Because that’s what we’re expecting. If we don’t get that, this is going to explode.” It is a shame to have to write all that when there is a solution that has existed in the world of programming languages for decades now.
Subtle (and not so subtle) Ruby bashing on a site run by and featuring interviewees with vested interests in the popularity of Scala are not particularly credible. I refer to Alex Payne and Bill Venners, both authors of Scala books.
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