Python 3 incorporated types into the language itself, in a similar way (though non-reified) to PHP. This seems much easier to deal with than requiring two files (.rb and .rbs) to describe a single data structure.
I'm having a really hard time understanding this "I need types forced down my throat" and "I like typing 3x as much as I would otherwise need to" and "yes, I want half my screen obscured by the types of everything I'm doing, not the actual code" and the "adding types now means bugs are impossible" mass cult hysteria that's running so rampant. Typing very occasionally prevents bugs that are generally easy to catch/fix or show up straight away when running an app. It's mostly a documentation system. And it slows development down.
Especially in Ruby which is such an elegant "programmer's language" I think it would just be silly.
In the course of my job I write Swift for iOS and Ruby for server APIs and our web-based UIs.
Type issues are about 0% of my Ruby bugs, but dealing with all the damn type requirements in Swift regularly takes dozens of minutes to track down when some weird esoteric error message pops up. And God help you if you try to use generics.
If you want strong typing, then good for you. Just pick a language that fits that mold.
So much of what I love about Ruby is what it doesn't make me do.
I'm sure there are developer/projects that both enjoy and benefit from static typing and strict type systems of various kinds. I just want Ruby to remain a place for those of us who aren't in those positions.
However, even with TypeScript ascendant, the vast majority of people programming JavaScript write vanilla dynamic JS. I don't think dynamically typed Ruby is ever going to die. Whether large enterprise codebases will standardize on requiring type signatures is a different matter, because the benefits always outweigh what downsides you see in static typing once you surpass a certain scale.
> "Whether large enterprise codebases will standardize on requiring type signatures is a different matter"
Totally agree that there will always be people who value this tradeoff. That's fine, I just want the Ruby I know and love to keep existing.
I do hear a lot of complaints about Swift's type system. I wonder what the specific problems are, because I do not hear similar complaints about Rust. I wonder if it's the combination of subtyping with a lot of type inference and also a full-on trait system with protocols and extensions and such.