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Ruby is not a duck-typed language. "duck-typing" is only touted by its community to award it free credibility and merit where there is none. "duck-typing" is es

by Smfranz 12y ago

Ruby is not a duck-typed language. "duck-typing" is only touted by its community to award it free credibility and merit where there is none. "duck-typing" is essentially free for any dynamic typed language which have method RTTI. So please, stop the "duck-typing" pride parade. It is nauseating.

marvy 12y ago
Huh? If Ruby is not duck-typed, can you give me an example of a something that is? It seems like the textbook example. Here are two weird examples: 1. C++ templates and 2) C# variables declared dynamic (I don't know C#, could be wrong) Are we using the same definitions as each other?
- phamilton 12y ago
  I think the point is that duck-typing in Ruby is less of a feature and more of an inevitability due to its dynamic RTTI nature. Compare that to duck-typing in Go where it was a very deliberate design decision.
  - djur 12y ago
    Duck typing generally refers exclusively to runtime type checking (i.e. dynamically-typed languages). What Go does is structural typing.
    - marvy 12y ago
      I disagree. C++ templates for instance are also duck-typed, but they act at compile time, not run time.
- djur 12y ago
  Duck typing is more of a technique than a quality of a language. Any dynamically-typed language is going to end up having some code that does runtime type checking. Duck typing just means doing respond_to? instead of :kind_of? when doing so. Ruby is certainly a language suitable for the duck typing technique. The term was originally used in reference to Python, and both languages have reasonably equivalent reflection abilities.