Bladerunner Day, Ruby Type Signatures, Typing at Stripe

A few months ago, the Ruby core team announced their plans for typing in Ruby 3, a long awaited feature which, if done right, will have profound benefits to the language’s safety and productivity, especially where large codebases are concerned.The history of typing in programming languages generally is interesting. The idea’s been around forever, with some of the earliest languages like C having relatively good type systems, but over the next few decades there’d be wild divergence in thinking as language creators experimented with different approaches. Some went for stronger typing, giving us C , D, Java, and on the furthest reach of the spectrum where types became a religion, Haskell. But simultaneously, there was an equal push for weaker typing, with the appearance of Perl, Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and the like.