alt Hacker NewsThey should integrate this to ruby-core and make it even better by changing the parser and making it faster in terms of performance, as optimized as it can.
But I have a hard time believing ruby-core will want to hear community feedback... people have been talking about this for ages... Ruby is omakase?
RBS and Sorbet suck. One is very limited, the other isn't part of ruby-core and makes you rewrite the function arguments again, similar to Java's annotations... Doesn't look like Ruby at all, or DRY, mostly like a workaround!
LowType is what it should have been -- hard to believe we are in 2025 and we still don't have a decent, programmer-friendly solution in ruby-core.
Meanwhile Python has it right since a long time. No wonder it is so stagnated with people going for other stacks.
Ruby is slowly becoming what Perl did, a very niche language.
Replies
I agree with your analysis that RBS and Sorbet suck.
I disagree that this here should be part of ruby-core, largely because I don't think any of this type madness should infiltrate ruby.
Ruby does not necessarily follow "DRY" - that appears to have been coined by either DHH or the pickaxe guys. More than one way to do it, is kind of orthogonal to DRY too. Note: I do not disagree that DRY has value. What I am saying is that ruby's design does not necessarily follow DRY as a guiding principle.
> hard to believe we are in 2025 and we still don't have a decent, programmer-friendly solution in ruby-core.
I do not think the year has anything to do with it. If they suck - and types suck - then they should not be in ruby core. I understand you have another opinion, but that's the beauty - we have orthogonal opinions there. One says must be part of ruby core; the other says should not be part of ruby-core ever, no matter the year.
> Meanwhile Python has it right since a long time.
The question is: how many use it there?
> No wonder it is so stagnated with people going for other stacks.
Lack of types aren't the reason ruby declined. That is a wrong assumption here.
> Ruby is slowly becoming what Perl did, a very niche language.
That is true, but not due to lack of types. Python without types would still be at rank #1 at TIOBE for instance. Your analysis is simply wrong here.
Ruby needs a Typescript. Leave ruby-core as it is. Let us write Ruby with type annotations, where the compiler does type checking, strips the annotations, and leaves us with plain runnable Ruby.