Past, Present, and Future of Sorbet Type Syntax

Here’s the elephant in the room: Sorbet’s syntax is ugly. When people start complaining about Sorbet’s syntax, I have to spend a lot of time deflecting or even defending it, which is annoying: I’m right there with you, the syntax is ugly! It’s verbose. It’s foreign. It doesn’t resemble any typed language, nor does it complement Ruby’s unique style. My counter is that when it comes to language design, semantics—what the types mean—are easily 10 times more important than syntax. This is what I was taught; it’s also what I’ve seen. Programming is an act of theory building, and when you sit down to write code, you’re trying to codify how you’re thinking about a problem as much as instructions for the machine. Types become a tool to help get the semantics from your head into the codebase. That’s a lossy process, and types fill a role kind of like “error correcting codes” for brain dumping. So I try very hard to not get sucked into debates about syntax—in no small part because from where ... Read full article.