Whether the latter is/was a sound idea, we’ll discuss it a bit later. Type annotations in dynamic languages seemed to fall into this list, at least in the eyes of a part of the community. To name a few: first-class lambdas/closures, algebraic types, pattern matching, actor concurrency. The baseline of what the modern high-level language should provide has shifted significantly in the last decade, with many elements that were previously associated with academic/experimental languages gaining their attention in the mainstream. The main one was a 3-fold performance improvement compared to Ruby 2.0 (known as the “Ruby 3x3” initiative) while preserving full backward compatibility but also, the “big digit” release obviously asked for new cool features.

The feature that might’ve beenĪ few years ago, when the Ruby 3 release was brewing, there were a lot of expectations laid on it. It is also probably not very historically accurate: I write about decisions and discussions in Ruby design and how I remember them without trying too hard to validate it with remaining documents and discussion logs.

It focuses on some design decisions, the reasons that forced them to be made, and the consequences that came after.Ĭonsidering the conditions of its writing, the article will be somewhat imprecise in its definitions, preferring “layman” definitions to strict ones. The text below might be (or might not be) interesting for Rubyists as well for a general audience of programming language design space enthusiasts. That discussion made me remember some thoughts on type annotation situation in Ruby I’ve distilled while working on my Ruby book (now postponed till our victory) some of those thoughts expressed an urge to be shared. The discussion quickly turned into a generic argument about typing, type annotations, dynamic and static languages, and so forth. Recently, there was a long and quite interesting discussion in /r/ruby, which started with an article about one of Ruby’s type annotation tools, Sorbet-or rather, the reason somebody would abandon attempts of using it. TBH, since joining the army, I didn’t expect to have time or inspiration to write about Ruby, and yet, here we are. I am writing this on my phone, in a barrack that houses some 200+ of my brothers-in-arms in the Ukrainian army’s training camp I use short periods of rest between training, mostly at night and on Sundays. …that were written in a military training camp and accidentally grew to 5k words.

The annotated persuasion