441: The Pickaxe Book with Noel Rappin

Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at Thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joelle Kenville. And I'm Steph Nieman, and we're also joined by a very special guest, Noel Rapin. Hi. I'm here. Yes, you are. I'm here to talk about bike sheds. Is this are we not talking about bike sheds? You know what? That is actually a different show. Oh, damn. I'm just kidding. Alright. Software it is then. Yeah. And together, we're here to share a little bit about what we've learned along the way. I have derailed us already. I'm sorry. No. It's great. This is what we do on the bike shed. Let's go. So, Noel, the question that we open with every week is what's new in your world? I have to give the self promotional answer, answer, I guess. Like, what's new in my world is that I have this book out, the pickaxe book, programming Ruby three three. I guess it's, like, new relative to previous versions of it, so I'm the coauthor of it. And it is new up to current versions of Ruby. And, also, you know, I just did just as we recorded this, posted a very, very long blog post about ways to work around static typing in Ruby by using Ruby's dynamic type system, which is a thing that I have been, like, writing about online for a bit in these very long, probably nobody reads to the end blog posts. So that's that's what's new with me professionally, I guess. I'm really curious about that static typing, dynamic typing area that you've been digging in. What is it there that particularly excites you or gets you interested? So this started with some discussions with work colleagues about sorbet and the value of sorbet and static typing within Ruby. And I think I have a sort of idiosyncratic vision of that because unlike a lot of Ruby developers who came to Ruby through Java or other statically typed languages, I guess a lot of Ruby developers came through Python now. But I came to Ruby through small talk, so I am extremely comfortable with the idea that there are no static types and that you can still build large systems with it. And I got into trying to extract why I felt that way and what it was specifically about the discussion around static typing in Ruby that really rubbed me the wrong way and which is essentially, there's a line of thought that it is always good to be more strict, and it's always good to be more static, that there's never ever any downside to being more static, that it is a good in and of itself. That is apparently the only thing in software design that has, like, only benefits and never has any costs. And and that sort of attitude, I was trying to fairly, but to also say, like, hey. There are …