Yeah, Sorbet and the progress being made in Ruby-land makes me want to go back and give it a good look. I really like Ruby. I just really like writing silly in/out tests less.
I just really like writing silly in/out tests less.
Were you writing a bunch of tests to make sure that A is passing arguments of the right type to B?
I'm not sure that's a great use of time. If A is passing the wrong thing to B, B will throw a `NoMethodError` anyway once it tries to do anything with the arguments, which will make the spec test fail anyway.
But maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "silly in/out tests"...
You can get away with that if you're writing something for immediate delivery, though I think it leads to a lot of not-my-problem thinking in teams that have to scale. On the other hand, I write a lot of libraries, both for internal and external consumption, and there are a lot of operations, in that context, where you won't get a `NoMethodError`--serialization, for example. You can happily serialize an integer if it's passed instead of a string. That doesn't mean it makes sense, or whatever is consuming it is going to be able to make heads or tails of it, and having to run code in order to know whether you've made trivial mistakes is shitty and demoralizing to an end user when they have to divine what a `NoMethodError` means when it's thrown deep inside of a library.
It can also then create security issues around untrusted input; you should be sanitizing at module boundaries any time something might be sensibly used with rando input, IMO, rather than relying on web developers who may or may not be competent enough to duplicate other consumers' effort to do it.
Having to do less work to enforce sanity at module boundaries, and having it tied in with the type system when you do have to do it, is a powerful force-multiplier. For example: I use `runtypes` to create validators in TypeScript when I must handle untrusted input and it's smart enough to take the validator I specify and create a type of the same shape for use at compile-time, so users who aren't dealing with untrusted input just have the nice computer cross the T's and dot the I's for them.
Those are really good counterexamples and I love your points.
However... just kidding, there's no "however." Great reply.
You can get away with that if you're writing
something for immediate delivery,
I've worked on some big Rails monoliths and this just wasn't an issue very often.
But as you say, I think library code is another story.
Incidentally, whether library or application code, I've found that keyword arguments with well-chosen names have reduced this problem even further. It's not clear that `do_something("blue")` is incorrect, but `do_something(user_age: "blue")` is self-evidently bad.
I'm not sure that's a great use of time. If A is passing the wrong thing to B, B will throw a `NoMethodError` anyway once it tries to do anything with the arguments, which will make the spec test fail anyway.
But maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "silly in/out tests"...