Scala over Ruby - My Debate Ends

I've maintained posts about things I like in better about Scala and/or Ruby, but, it's time to put an end to the debate. I've been doing Ruby every day for almost 6 months now, and finally conclude that for me, it just doesn't feel nearly as nice as Scala. It's not ever close, to be blunt.

My main reason? Refactoring. Over the years I've become very good at refactoring; I've actually been called a refactoring machine. I have a lot of experience refactoring really, really terrible code. Yes, this sucks, I have a history of picking the wrong job. Fortunately though, I also have some experience refactoring really nice code as well. The code that I'm working on now in Ruby is fairly new, and quite good. All the Scala code that I write is pretty good (room for improvement, but pretty good).

I can refactor so easily in Scala with huge confidence and I can't do that in Ruby at all. In Ruby:

• It takes a long time to make major refactorings.


• I'm never fully confident in my refactorings and almost always get annoyed by runtime errors.


• Sometimes the stack traces are all messed up and I can't figure out where my actual error is.


• Most code you run into isn't going to have enough test coverage to help anyway.


• For all the preachers of TDD and instant feedback - tests untimately/inevitably take (far) longer than the compiler. So I really don't have the instant feedback I need.


• If you skip refactorings in Ruby because they are hard, your code becomes harder and harder to refactor. This goes for statically typed languages as well, but, it's a lot harder with Ruby, especially considering the points above.


• Ad infinitum...

In my next post I'm going to cover a bunch of major refactorings I just did to my Lexer, and how easy it was.