[nolamikey]

Personally I can't wait for the "type hype" to die down. I see the utility of type hints for optimization, but I'm tired of people acting like you can't safely write code without types. Mostly they trot out examples of types guarding against the most trivial errors. You can do just as much within an object oriented message-passing paradigm. Objects ARE types, as far as I'm concerned, with the bonus of also defining operations on those types in a (for lack of a better term) type-specific way. Bolting types on to JavaScript isn't going to make all the warts go away, and forcing them into Ruby wouldn't be transformational (at least I hope not). There's crystal for that sort of thing.

Setting aside performance for the moment, the valid criticisms of languages like Ruby center around the amount of magic that can happen behind the scenes (and what can happen to programmers who use libraries without understanding said magic). Magic isn't intrinsically bad, though. Yes, it can make programming in the large more difficult, but its also a force multiplier that can make it much easier. We shouldn't make programming suck for everyone because there's a shortage of good programmers. We should be figuring out how to make more good programmers-- and that is one thing I think Ruby can definitely help with. It's accessible, and it has support of all kinds of programming paradigms despite being an OO language. You can explore all kinds of things with it. By the time someone has outgrown Ruby, they should be in a good position to understand why and evaluate the tradeoffs of changing horses.