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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Are new developers choosing Ruby on Rails?

I feel like there’s a real shift towards strong (er) typing.

What does this mean for Rails?

My main language has been Python for a long time now but I’m really coming to prefer typescript for certain applications.

Does Ruby remain relevant as the industry moves towards typed languages?

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ruby is strongly typed, in that it doesn't allow you to implicitly coerce between types*: 1 + "1" will raise an error. (As opposed to weak typing in C or JS)

ruby however is not statically typed.

*(there are actually ways to implement certain types of coercions by defining to_ary, to_str, to_int)

Isn't ruby strong and dynamic?

There's no type annotations (outside of experiments), and thus no way for a "compiler" step to tell you if you're passing an array to a function that expects a string or something. The "strong" typing doesn't happen until runtime, so the closest you can get to this is writing a unit test that asserts on the behavior you want (assert that this method raises an exception when I pass an array, etc.) This is what people mean by "typed languages". Ruby isn't one of them.

Ruby has Sorbet and RBS as options to integrate types into Ruby projects, so Ruby isn't sitting still on this front.

Having seen how well typing works with python and FastAPI - I'm afraid the current path ruby is on isn't great, unfortunately. It feels extremely bolted on - but I hope something useful and enjoyable will come out of the various typing efforts.

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