David Heinemeier Hansson has a great post today about Ruby’s advanced dynamic features. Some people would criticize Ruby (and Rails) for including “sharp knives in its drawer of features”, but David argues that it’s a worthwhile tradeoff to give developers such power and flexibility:
There’s nothing programmatically in Ruby to stop you using its sharp knives to cut ties with reason. We enforce such good senses by convention, by nudges, and through education. Not by banning sharp knives from the kitchen and insisting everyone use spoons to slice tomatoes.
Given the recent discussions from the Apple community, I couldn’t stop thinking of Swift as I read David’s post. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that Swift is a dull knife; there is a lot to like about the language, and I feel reasonably productive in it now. But David’s “paternalism” line nevertheless rings true to me, that the Swift compiler is trying to protect us from ourselves.
