[flats]

Honest question: what’s an example of a fully-featured web framework that makes upgrading a “large & old” application painless? In my experience, upgrading an underlying framework that a piece of complex software depends upon without breaking everything pretty much always requires time & good test coverage.

[Gigachad]

Type safety would fix 99% of the issues I've had upgrading Rails.

[flats]

Yes, typing would obviate the need for the sorts of extensive unit testing I'm talking about here. I feel that. Luckily, the frontier LLMs (especially Claude) have gotten _really_ good at writing Rspec...

[lackoftactics]

things that people in Ruby community don't like to hear for $1000

[pjmlp]

Most Java and .NET ones, not everything breaks, statically compiled, so not as many unit tests required as in dynamic languages.

While it is deprecated, you can do a File=>New Project for Web Forms in 2026.

[pmontra]

Why do many people mention the need of tests for types in dynamically typed languages?

In Rails my tests are mostly to ensure that a request to a controller returns the expected response and the expected changes in the database. Unit tests are often on validations and the errors they return for invalid data. Then there are functional tests that drive a headless browser.

[pjmlp]

Because they are a requirement to avoid runtime errors that usually are compilation errors in other languages.

Not fun in production.

Dynamic languages with optional typing like BASIC or Common Lisp is another matter.