Existential crisis at Railsconf

Dynamic has a nice exploratory quality. It pushes off the moment of reckoning, but sometimes you need that if you're sketching an idea in code. It was good for me when I first learned, and I think that's still true now. For "in the large" systems it's basically required that stuff gets a bit more gooshy and dynamic-y and interact in an indirect, protocol-driven fashion.

But when you actually have a specific piece of engineering in mind, it's nowhere near as helpful - it tends to solve things that could probably be solved more soundly with compile-time constructs. But there's a process of building up your understanding to where you can actually have confidence in what you're building, which isn't reached so easily. Having the compiler fail your code before it can run is very "magical" in that sense.

> The examples you give don't seem to be typing problems, they seem to be wrong-value problems.

They're like type or name errors because the "apple" and "orange" here are like identifiers, not data. Sure, to the browser, they're data. But in terms of the structure of the web application, they're identifiers like variables, function names, or types.

For example, the HTTP endpoint "/apples?count=5" is like a function "apples(int count)."

> Actually building such a beast would seem to be a non-trivial engineering challenge.

It certainly would. That's why I'm wondering if you consider it possible.

the logic of your analysis is sound. I suppose I'm just not sure that client-side type and name errors constitute a large fraction of all web app errors.

Anecdotally, the team I am on doesn't have these issues (we certainly have other issues), but I could see them being important to prevent on certain projects.

>> ...it's hard for me to even consider the idea of Javascript being in the same category as Ruby.

Indeed. I think anyone would agree...they were not built for the same purpose; however, let's set some expectations here. As it relates to backend JSON APIs, what is better about Ruby/Bundler?

>> Ruby was designed from scratch to be a perfect...dream

OK, that's fine. Though, I've never heard of a proven perfect language/platform, regardless of intention.

>> I really want to write half a book more about why I think Ruby is so much better than Javascript...

Please, no book, but I would be happy to read one concrete example of why Ruby/Bundler is substantially better hands down. Of course, you are free to argue that you just don't like JS. I'd be fine with reading that, but I'm still curious to see a real example. I'm willing to accept that I may be wrong, but without proof, we can't get there.

Yes, Ruby is a nice looking language; still, I have not come across any proof that writing, maintaining, and deploying Ruby/Bundler is substantially better than writing, maintaining, and deploying Node/npm for backend JSON APIs especially given the gratis performance benefit and ease-of-use of Node/npm.

The same or better result with lower overhead and better performance. Before I ever wrote a line of JS intended to be executed via Node.JS, I actually thought Ruby was better as well :)

*

NOTE: I am quite aware that some Haskell lover is probably laughing and sticking their nose up at this entire conversation. That is perfectly fine because I'm willing to bet they can actually provide the concrete example I am looking for.

> Please, no book, but I would be happy to read one concrete example of why Ruby/Bundler is substantially better hands down.

One illustrative example might be the existance of Celluloid. The idea that you as a developer of Ruby apps can swap out the I/O system to something that's arguable better than what what the default style is. The reason Javascript can't do that is because it doesn't have synchronous I/O, nor multithreading, it's simply lacking those primitives.

I don't like the callback style, and I'm not entirely sold on promises.

In any case both those 'issues' might be close to fundamental differences between Ruby and Javascript but if I'm honest, this is going to sound like I'm back pedalling, but in real measurable terms they won't affect the quality of your codebase. I don't think porting a library from Javascript to Ruby would solve any real problem (as Haskell would), and it would result in your library being slower.

The dozens of little things that make Ruby a more pleasant language, they are what keeps me on the Ruby side for most projects.

> I am quite aware that some Haskell lover is probably laughing and sticking their nose up at this entire conversation.

Haha, I'm actually also a Haskell programmer. My top 3 is Ruby, Haskell, C# ;) I do Ruby and CoffeeScript for a living, build games in C# as a hobby and am building a C compiler in Haskell as my secret plot to take over the world. I have a sideproject that's a REST API in Haskell as well, but I'm not 100% convinced yet that Haskell is right for that.

Easy proofs for Haskell superiority: You can compile into a static executable. You can make the typesystem enforce the correctness of your user input parsing (this is crazy effective in JSON Apis, so effective that I now use Grape in Ruby to do sort of the same thing). Its lack of OO and focus on processing data leads to very clean architecture. Its level of abstraction is so crazy that they can actually swap out their entire I/O system for another one without changing any application interfaces, this one blew my mind, it's the change that makes GHC 7.8 run the Warp webserver twice as fast. They actually changed it so the 'fork' system call does not actually spawn a new thread, it spawns a fiber that's run in an event loop type system, and changed all the I/O functions to use asynchronous I/O on that event loop. All of this without changing a line in Warp, they just transparently made every traditional Haskell use modern I/O principles. Academics man, they're smart ;)

C# is cool because it manages to stay clean, fast and structured even though it's super powerful and implements almost every paradigm known to man. It's a statically typed compiled language with near native performance, yet code in it is nearly as succinct as Ruby. If I'd jump ship from Ruby because of performance reasons, it'd be to C#, not Node.js. Provided it runs smoothly on linux of course ;)