[shevy-java]

This is even worse because you attempt to try to sell why types SOMETIMES make sense. But you aim with this for a language that did not have nor need types to begin with. People don't seem to understand that this is an issue.

The library-situation is really not different from having types everywhere, and some people will do that too.

> catch bugs that you might otherwise miss.

People repeat this a lot. In about 22 years of writing ruby code, I have never ran into a situation once where I would have caught a bug through types. I don't understand why people keep on repeating this. Repetition does not make it anymore true.

Think in the opposite way: if types would have been necessary to begin with, why would ruby have been successful back in 2006? It was successful without types already. And types were never needed - they came because some people THINK they are needed. This is the biggest problem - the thinking part. They think they are right and all who do not use types, must be wrong and very foolish people.

[dminik]

Have you considered these people in general aren't some outsiders out to attack you or your favorite language?

The people who do end up making and using type checkers are people who have or are actively using these dynamic languages and found out that they CAN help THEM with preventing bugs.

Also, really? 22 years in which not one type-related error happened? Never? I don't want to say I don't believe you, but I really don't.

[madeofpalk]

> In about 22 years of writing ruby code, I have never ran into a situation once where I would have caught a bug through types

You must be the world's greatest programmer with perfect memory. Every nil pointer exception is a bug a (good) type checker could have caught. You've never had a NameError or NoMethodError in Ruby?

[rowanG077]

This is perhaps the least believable comment I have seen on HN, ever. It would be more believable for someone using C to say "In about 22 years of writing C code. I have never ran into a memory bug".

[adrian_b]

This is not as uncommon as you may think.

Avoiding "memory bugs" in C is trivial, but tedious, so too many C programmers fail to use an appropriate programming style. Nonetheless, there are some who have never encountered a "memory bug" in programs written by them.

I agree that a programming language should enforce such features, instead of counting on competent programmers.

[stackskipton]

SRE here, I've had multiple outages caused by lack of typing in both Ruby and Python where bad types get passed, something doesn't catch it and either data corruption or constant crashes. Couple cost us big money because it screwed up billing and we were forced to eat the billing cost.

[nijave]

>In about 22 years of writing ruby code, I have never ran into a situation once where I would have caught a bug through types.

I've definitely ran into that although much less common at places with good test discipline.

I think the related and often conflated problem is errors caught by compilers which you don't hit til runtime in Ruby/Python without good test coverage. For example, referencing an undefined variable

[12_throw_away]

> In about 22 years of writing ruby code, I have never ran into a situation once where I would have caught a bug through types.

In 22 years you have never seen `nil` show up in places it wasn't expected? Really?

[saxenaabhi]

Your app didn't silently break when you upgrade rails or any other gem?

If ruby was statically typed the typechecker would have caught it.