Avdi Grim has begun a thought-provoking series surrounding the idea of sustainable software development – specifically targeting Ruby as an example.

With some of the recent discussion surrounding “monkey patching” in Ruby, I think that the timing seems about right, for some serious thought to be given about the long-term effects of maintaining Ruby-based code-bases, should prolific “monkey patching” continue to be used haphazardly by many of the libraries, plugins, gems and other code that makes (sometimes critical?) modifications to the underlying core language classes.

Nick Sieger has crafted a thoughtful response to Avdi, which includes the quote:

[Monkey patching is] still a basic part of the Ruby programming culture, like it or not.

While Nick is totally correct, and Ruby does give you the power to shoot, maim and otherwise pillage and murder yourself in a bazillion different ways – that doesn’t take away the fact that it is still an incredibly powerful, elegant and syntactically beautiful programming language.

At the risk of sounding like a trite broken record (for the 485,000 time), I think that once again it boils down to using and choosing the right tools for the job. If the consequences of Ruby’s dynamism (among whatever other consequences) outweigh the positive benefits that a Ruby solution provides – then choose a different tool.

You can complain about the verbosity of a language like Java all you want (heck, I know I do at times), but I come back to Java sometimes after working with Ruby for a few months, and I’m all of a sudden thankful for strict, static typing, always knowing what I’m gonna get.

What continues to irk me are the folks who seem completely hell-bent that their way is the only One True Way™.

I was in a job interview the other day (company name shall be kept confidential) at a place that does extensive software development in many languages including Java, C, C++, Perl and PHP (at the very least). Near the end of the interview, we were discussing different languages, and I mentioned how sometimes I really enjoy the dynamic typing facet of Ruby, as opposed to the statically typed facet of Java. At this statement, one of the interviewers piped up to tell me that the fact that I enjoyed dynamic typing at times was “the most brain-dead thing” he’d ever heard anyone say.

It seems so strange to me, to be on the receiving end of an insult like that, coming from a company that performs extensive development in PHP (which is not only dynamically typed, but also weakly typed, as opposed to Ruby which is strictly typed).

At any rate, all of that comes to some sort of summary that everyone should already know by now:

1. there is no silver bullet
2. think before you choose your tool/language/whatever
3. don’t hate the unknown simply because it’s unknown
4. don’t call someone brain-dead if they sometimes enjoy a programming language that is dynamically typed, it hurts their feelings
5. read Avdi’s series on sustainable development in Ruby.