Dynamic Languages Are Just Wrong For 99% of All Development

There has been a flurry of excitement over ruby and a few other dynamically typed languages in the last few years, driven mainly by rails on the server side and javascript on the browser. Rails is a great project and is far better for most websites than the J2EE stack, but that unfortunately obscures the fact that the language it is built on, ruby, while superior to Java in many ways, just isn't the right thing for most developers.

This is a relatively new opinion of mine. You can see previous posts of mine where I'm very enthusiastic about ruby. And, at some level, I'm still enthusiastic about it. Many of the features Ruby offers we've translated into GScript at Guidewire and I'm forever in debt to it for that. But that doesn't change the fact that I think it is wrong for most developers.

In order to prove this somewhat ridiculous claim, I'll compare what I consider the key features of ruby and how GScript matches up in its statically typed world.

Terseness

Ruby is incredibly terse when compared with many statically typed languages. As a motivating example, a simple enterprise-y method definition might look like this (Note: I intentionally include an assignment to a local var in order to contrast with GScript):

  def employees_over_age( age )
    emps = @employees.find_all { | e | e.age > age }
    emps
  end

  function employeesOverAge( age : int ) : Employee[] {
    var emps = _employees.findAll( \ e -> e.age > age )
    return emps
  }

  class String
    def my_method()
      puts( "Holy Crap!!! I've added a method to Strings!" )
    end
  end

  enhancement MyStrEnhancement : String {
     function myMethod() {
       print( "Holy Crap!!! I've added a method to Strings!")
     }
  }