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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

The problem, I think, is the restrictions that not having a compilation step places on what typing you can do without a big breaking change. Typescript didn't have this problem because everyone already used bundlers/minifiers/etc. Adding another compiler like step to that process was pretty natural.

Ruby doesn't have that and adding it in poses problems for REPL development. They chose to go with a separate file for types. Which gets around the breaking change problem but the ergonomics are terrible. Think the hope is that IDE support eventually gets around that issue. But thus far not a whole lot of adoption.

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Sure, this is an advantage that Typescript has, but it doesn't explain Ruby's lagging progress compared to Python and PHP.

Some of that can probably pinned on the greater dynamism of Ruby, making all manner of static analysis quite challenging.

But from what I've seen, it seems like the main reason is indifference or even mild hostility from the language maintainers. It looks a lot like they saw Sorbet taking off and slapped together a competing spec (without any associated tooling) that would ensure all type information stays outside of the `.rb` file.

It seems like the only impact it has had is to dissuade people who would like some static types from adopting it, in favor of this vaporware. Contrast this with Python's embrace gradual extension of mypy type hints.

I'd love to be proven wrong, that there are thriving projects building atop RBS. I'd still _prefer_ a system that allowed me to type a function signature so that anyone inspecting it could immediately know its shape, but at least the shadow types would be _something_.

I've seen more than one ruby dev proclaim they specifically don't want types; if you want a language that has it, there are plenty to choose from.

My take here is that typed-ruby is something SOME people want (I'm one), but a lot don't.

I'm not sure what level of force that provides to anyone who has either tried or is considering adding it to the language.

I agree that Sorbet is a better solution but it's also a breaking change. It's a relatively small breaking change and, IMHO, would have been more than worth it but alas it was not my decision to make.

Speaking for sorbet - no compilation step is a feature, not a bug. Imagine adding some kind of build step to every ruby app out there! Sorbet annotations are just valid ruby code you add to your files (you don't need to write separate type files - the sorbet system might do this for you though).

Sorbet also provides a gradual typing system where you can start adding types to a large code base and gradually make the checking more strict. Stripe claims to be using it on a huge ruby code base and that their developers generally like it.

However I think many devs don't want static types on Ruby. We like our duck typing!

Couldn't you still have duck typing?

If a method expects to be passed an argument that it can call "quack" on, can't you define a type that has "quack"? The actual argument could be a Duck or a Goose but as long as it has a "quack" method the type will be OK

I haven't used types in Ruby (or much at all other than dabbling in Typescript), so I might be missing something

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