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I think "refactoring is much safer in strongly-typed languages" is a point against using Ruby. It's my understanding that some of what counts as "writing tests"

I think "refactoring is much safer in strongly-typed languages" is a point against using Ruby. It's my understanding that some of what counts as "writing tests" in Ruby would be covered by static types in other languages. -- But it's also not the case that that having types excuses the developer from having tests. (Maybe with dependent types?). This point reminds me of some essays from Steve Yegge where he argued that one way of categorising programmers was into two groups: 'conservatives' who liked languages like Haskell where you could have confidence the code worked if it compiled, etc. and 'liberals' who liked languages like Ruby, where if you notice something breaks you just fix it; just write some feature to see if it works or not. -- I'd think for prototyping it's nicer to have the latter attitude, and it's more reasonable you'll have an understanding of the system since it's so fresh. For long term maintenance, the former is surely better

yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
I think you're right, and it was more Ruby (and other similar languages) that I was abandoning rather than Rails specifically. I like Rails. I can't speak for everyone, but my perspective comes from a place of practicality as opposed to philosophy. I (and also my team) try to push the domain we're modelling into the types, but we also write a whole bunch of tests (which includes isolated, integrated, and property-based tests). I've never understood the argument of one vs the other — it's great to have both. Programming is tough so I'll take all the help I can get.
jmchuster 6y ago
The Rails/Ruby community has probably the most developed testing culture out of all the programming communities out there, because tests are so critical when you're writing in a dynamic backend language. You don't have the built-in "tests" from a compiler that check every argument and method reference. And then you don't have as fast and obvious a feedback loop as you do with frontend languages.

yakshaving_jgt 6y ago

I think you're right, and it was more Ruby (and other similar languages) that I was abandoning rather than Rails specifically. I like Rails. I can't speak for everyone, but my perspective comes from a place of practicality as opposed to philosophy. I (and also my team) try to push the domain we're modelling into the types, but we also write a whole bunch of tests (which includes isolated, integrated, and property-based tests). I've never understood the argument of one vs the other — it's great to have both. Programming is tough so I'll take all the help I can get.

jmchuster 6y ago

The Rails/Ruby community has probably the most developed testing culture out of all the programming communities out there, because tests are so critical when you're writing in a dynamic backend language. You don't have the built-in "tests" from a compiler that check every argument and method reference. And then you don't have as fast and obvious a feedback loop as you do with frontend languages.