> People are far too obsessed with static type checking.
I thought this too. I'm a huge Ruby fan, and also Clojure and Elixir. In Clojure you have Spec (https://clojure.org/guides/spec) which is pretty powerful if you choose to use it. And in Elixir, you have pattern matching that can take you quite a long distance without need for specifying explicit types. ...
But lately I've been learning Swift, and now I'm in favor of explicit static typing. (You don't have to be explicit always with Swift, but it's not much trouble to be so... and it's necessary sometimes.) And then switching back to Ruby, I find myself wishing for that visible type clarity on function params. Am I dealing with an object and needing to reference properties? Is this a hash and I can access key/value pairs? A developer using some library may have to dig in and read library source to really know what's expected when types are not required or listed in the function signature.
What I would like to see is Elixir style pattern matching with static types. Then you can "duck type" in terms of the shape of the input as long as it conforms to some subset of data+type.
I thought this too. I'm a huge Ruby fan, and also Clojure and Elixir. In Clojure you have Spec (https://clojure.org/guides/spec) which is pretty powerful if you choose to use it. And in Elixir, you have pattern matching that can take you quite a long distance without need for specifying explicit types. ...
But lately I've been learning Swift, and now I'm in favor of explicit static typing. (You don't have to be explicit always with Swift, but it's not much trouble to be so... and it's necessary sometimes.) And then switching back to Ruby, I find myself wishing for that visible type clarity on function params. Am I dealing with an object and needing to reference properties? Is this a hash and I can access key/value pairs? A developer using some library may have to dig in and read library source to really know what's expected when types are not required or listed in the function signature.
What I would like to see is Elixir style pattern matching with static types. Then you can "duck type" in terms of the shape of the input as long as it conforms to some subset of data+type.