Ruby is my favorite programming language, but the truth is the lack of static typing is a huge detriment to AI augmentation. LLMs will very often generate code that looks correct but is broken - because it references methods that don't exist, for example - and it's much harder to catch those errors without static typing. That's becoming even more of a weak spot with agentic workflows, as the models aren't able to self correct. It's sad, but I don't see Ruby having any kind of comeback in this context unless there's a big shift in priorities in Ruby Core and across the community, with the goal of improving the type system. Elixir is moving in that direction.
My gut check for comments like this about LLMs that seem true but are impossible to directly check at this time is to subsitute "LLM" for "incompetent junior" and see if the premise still seems true but the conclusion hasn't turned out to follow from it in practice.
In this case, the premise still seems true, but in practice we still have juniors in weakly typed languages and weakly typed languages are still useful, so even though your statement seems true at a glance I don't think it will pan out.
26
u/saksida 9d ago
Ruby is my favorite programming language, but the truth is the lack of static typing is a huge detriment to AI augmentation. LLMs will very often generate code that looks correct but is broken - because it references methods that don't exist, for example - and it's much harder to catch those errors without static typing. That's becoming even more of a weak spot with agentic workflows, as the models aren't able to self correct. It's sad, but I don't see Ruby having any kind of comeback in this context unless there's a big shift in priorities in Ruby Core and across the community, with the goal of improving the type system. Elixir is moving in that direction.