This is a question I’ve been asking myself too (I am relatively new to Ruby).
At work, I contribute to a C++ project of some importance (40peoplex5years),
and I often get irritated by the lack of type checking, the bold assumption
some programmers make that they can safely downcast to some type. I
often wish we’d use contractual programming and have a language/compiler
combination that catches as much as possible at compile time. I do
believe this is the way to go for that kind of projects, and I wouldn’t
recommend Ruby in that situation.
For all other programming however, I would and do use Ruby because
it allows me to be vastly more productive since I don’t have to
‘spoon-feed the compiler’. Instead I rely on Ruby’s ability to guess what
I mean. In accordance with it’s principle of least surprise, it guesses
correctly most of the time ! The drawback of course is that it/I sometimes
makes/make mistakes that manifest in totally different parts of the code …
So, I return the question to you: do you see/use Java as a really
comfortable, fuzzy language that let’s you write things like you think
them (no superfluous compiler enlightening constructions needed) or do
you see it as a language to write huge, critical applications relying on
the interaction of a multitude of separately developed modules ?
I hope this sharing/answer helps you.
Kind regards,
Simon
···
On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 21:06:02 +0100, Robert bob.news@gmx.net wrote:
i’d like to know, what you folks say about this: is it a general matter or
is this distinction connected to the differences between Java and Ruby?
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