Dynamic typing

`1:06:38`

so much and what beautiful code is and what a beautiful programming language is. So one of the things that is I think implied maybe you made explicit in your descriptions there is that Ruby is dynamic typing versus strict typing. And you have been not just saying that it's a nice thing, but that you will defend dynamic typing to the death. Like that freedom is a powerful freedom to preserve. — It's the essence of what makes Ruby Ruby. This is why I don't fully understand when people call for Ruby to add static typing. 'Cause to me, it's the bedrock of what this is. Why would you wanna turn one of the most beautiful languages into something far uglier? This is one of my primary objections to static typing. It's not just that it limits you in certain ways. It makes metaprogramming harder. I write a bunch of metaprogramming. I've seen what it takes to do metaprogramming TypeScript. That was actually one of the things that just really sent me on a tear of getting meta

`1:07:39`

or getting TypeScript out of some of the projects that I'm involved with. We pulled TypeScript out of turbo. One of the front-end frameworks that we have, because I tried to write to metaprogramming in TypeScript and I was just infuriated. I don't want that experience, but I also don't want it from an aesthetic point of view. I hate repetition. We've just talked about how much I love that Ruby boils all of these expressions down to its essence. You can't remove one dot. You can't remove one character without losing something. This moment you go for static typing that you declare, at least I know there are ways to do implied typing and so forth. But let's just take the stereotypical case of a example, for example. Capital U, user, I'm declaring the type of the variable; lowercase user, I'm now naming my variable; equals uppercase user or new uppercase user. I've repeated user three times. I don't have time for this.

`1:08:40`

I don't have sensibilities for this. I don't want my Ruby polluted with this. Now I understand all the arguments for why people like static typing when the primary arguments is that it makes tooling easier. It makes it easier to do auto complete in editors, for example. It makes it easier to find certain kinds of bugs because maybe you're calling methods that don't exist on an object and the editor can actually catch that bug before you even run it. I don't care. First of all, I don't write code with tools. I write them with text editors. I chisel them out of the screen with my bare hands. I don't auto complete. And this is why I love Ruby so much, and this is why I continue to be in love with the text editor rather than the IDE. I don't want an IDE. I want my fingers to have to individually type out every element of it because it will force me to stay in the world

`1:09:42`

where Ruby is beautiful. Because as soon as it gets easy to type a lot of boilerplate, well guess what? You can have a lot of boilerplate. Every single language basically that has great tooling support has a much higher tolerance for boilerplate because the thinking is, well, you're not typing it anyway, you're just auto completing it. I don't want that at all. I want something where the fabric I'm working in, it's just a text file. There's nothing else to it. So these things play together. There's the aesthetic part, there's the tooling part, there's the metaprogramming part. There's the fact that Ruby's ethos of duck typing, I dunno if you've heard that term before. It's essentially not about, can I call this method, if a object is of a certain class. It is, can I call this method if the method responds? It's very out of Smalltalk in that regard. You don't actually check of whether that class has the method, which allows you to dynamically add methods at runtime