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> Web devs who use ruby ... Ruby is not a statically typed language and has nothing to do with type safety or ease of optimization. Reflection for a dynamic la

> Web devs who use ruby ... Ruby is not a statically typed language and has nothing to do with type safety or ease of optimization. Reflection for a dynamic language is hardly the same as reflection for static language.

joslin01 11y ago
Good way to take a few words completely out of context. I said "web devs who use ruby for 90% of projects" as in "they obviously don't care much about performance in the first place" If you had anything you wanted to offer, I'm all ears but you telling me dynamic vs static reflection have different implementation details (and necessarily different implications) is pretty obvious, wouldn't you agree?
- netheril96 11y ago
  I was wondering if you had more experience with Ruby than with a statically typed language like Java, and thus did not see the problem with reflection. Now, to answer your previous question, about how reflection is bad: * Reflection allows one to dynamically add, remove and modify properties and methods, and that breaks type safety. Compilers are no longer able to prove deterministically that a certain object has certain properties or certain methods, or that certain methods have certain signatures because all those may change at runtime. * That which can be dynamically changed must be dynamically resolved. And dynamic resolution is slower. * It breaks encapsulation. It exposes private APIs and allows immutable objects to be modified. That is why its usage is ugly. A dynamically typed language has much less problems with reflection, since in these languages, dynamic resolution is the norm, and they are not amenable to static analysis anyway.
fleitz 11y ago
It may not be statically typed, but it is strongly typed which is usually more useful than static typing. For instance the type system in C is static but weak, creating entire classes of issues that are hard to debug that don't exist in ruby.
- netheril96 11y ago
  > but it is strongly typed which is usually more useful than static typing. Strong typing is orthogonal to static typing and I do not believe one is more useful to another. The benefit of static typing is that you can catch many mistakes at compile time. Static typing also makes analysis and navigation of the code base easier.

joslin01 11y ago

Good way to take a few words completely out of context. I said "web devs who use ruby for 90% of projects" as in "they obviously don't care much about performance in the first place" If you had anything you wanted to offer, I'm all ears but you telling me dynamic vs static reflection have different implementation details (and necessarily different implications) is pretty obvious, wouldn't you agree?

netheril96 11y ago
I was wondering if you had more experience with Ruby than with a statically typed language like Java, and thus did not see the problem with reflection. Now, to answer your previous question, about how reflection is bad: * Reflection allows one to dynamically add, remove and modify properties and methods, and that breaks type safety. Compilers are no longer able to prove deterministically that a certain object has certain properties or certain methods, or that certain methods have certain signatures because all those may change at runtime. * That which can be dynamically changed must be dynamically resolved. And dynamic resolution is slower. * It breaks encapsulation. It exposes private APIs and allows immutable objects to be modified. That is why its usage is ugly. A dynamically typed language has much less problems with reflection, since in these languages, dynamic resolution is the norm, and they are not amenable to static analysis anyway.

fleitz 11y ago

It may not be statically typed, but it is strongly typed which is usually more useful than static typing. For instance the type system in C is static but weak, creating entire classes of issues that are hard to debug that don't exist in ruby.

netheril96 11y ago
> but it is strongly typed which is usually more useful than static typing. Strong typing is orthogonal to static typing and I do not believe one is more useful to another. The benefit of static typing is that you can catch many mistakes at compile time. Static typing also makes analysis and navigation of the code base easier.