[vox] Ruby gives you sharp knives (fwd)

[Harold Lee]

I agree that dynamic languages are fun and productive, but I still
feel like voicing some kind of defence for progress happening in
statically-typed languages. C++ templates / Java generics /
parameterized types give you a lot of flexibility, used in libraries
like C#'s LINQ, Easymock for Java unit testing and others.

Here's a good article on the same sort of AcitveRecord behavior in
Java as the Ruby example above:
http://www.javalobby.org/articles/activeobjects/
(ironically, the Ruby code also declares types for the fields!)

Then with Haskell's ability to figure out the data types and
parameters from your code, you end up without the type declarations,
like dynamic languages. Using the interactive Haskell ghci, it feels
like I'm doing Lisp development because I'm able to build up global
state variables and then build functions by trial and error.

I'm hopeful that Haskell-like type systems will finally make it so
that the static type system really gets out of your way except when
the code really is broken.

Harold