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Daniel Hoelbling-Inzko talks about programming

My beef with Ruby/Python

Posted by Daniel Hölbling on June 17, 2009

I just spent some time poking around Ruby after some poking around Python. And both times I find the typing concept awkward.
Not so much because there is none, but because there is one visible to the trained programmer, implicit but still there.

That being true for primitive types, for classes this makes a whole lot more sense, since we can use the concept of duck typing:

"when I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."

Some patterns we came to use in static languages are just obsolete in dynamic settings. But the cost to me is that I also have no metadata present about the object I am currently dealing with. It could be anything, and I don’t know before I execute it.  
In C# I can simply hit object. and see all available methods/properties/events, allowing me to look at their documentation and so on. In Ruby, not even the smarter IDEs like RubyMine can do that for you. 

That in itself is no big deal if you are only working with your own classes and methods, where you know how they work or have a general understanding of how they work. Where I really need this metadata is when working with complex frameworks and libraries that expose tons of stuff through protected members from superclasses, that are just invisible to me. That said, to me the whole Ruby/Python experience was more of a running around and hunting method signatures rather than getting something done.

I guess that experience is normal and I am rather sure I’ll get the hang of it rather sooner than later. But coming from years of static typing dynamic languages just feel weird and especially their way of interacting with you as a programmer are different (no Intellisense being my #1 problem with all of them)

Filed under programmierung, personal
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