> With Crystal, at least when it matures a bit more, this hypothesis could be tested.

You could test that now with http://rubyluwak.com/

RubyLuwak is statically typed with local type inference.

There are many loopholes in the law. For example, the law permits the GCSB to retain any communication that is "incidentally obtained", and to pass that communication to the police, all without a warrant.

where they burn macbooks, they will ultimately burn people also

> Neither copyright nor patent can give ownership rights in a color.

A color can be a trademark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_trademark

(trademarks and copyrights) ≠ (patents)

Ruby without dynamism runs a bit faster: http://rubyluwak.com/pages/benchmarks

WTF.... I just looked a bit closer at this, and for starters the graphs are for startup times compared to JRuby, and isn labelled with any values. They say nothing about the performance of the actual code.

Furthermore, it appears to be a commercial product, yet searching for it reveals only a handful of link to their own site, and hardly no mentions elsewhere and the examples/docs are pitiful at best.

Looking quite shady to me.

Hi, thanks for your frank comments.

the graphs are for startup times compared to JRuby

The first graph compares startup times. The second graph compares execution times. This has now been clarified on the site.

the examples/docs are pitiful at best

Working on it! What would you like the docs to address specifically?

Looking quite shady to me

I'm sorry you feel that way. Would you like a free evaluation license?

That's interesting, but if you start type annotating the code, then you lose a large part of what makes Ruby attractive to a lot of people.

people write annotations already anyway, in the comments or documentation: see the method signatures at http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Object.html

Yes, take a look at those method signatures. They are imprecise and incomplete. And that is for MRI itself. Very few Ruby projects has documentation anywhere near what MRI does, whether separate or in the comments.

But even if it did: Rubyists are far more likely to be tolerant about documenting type information in optional comments than including them in the code.

I think there's room for experimenting with Ruby's typing, but I also think the most that project can hope to achieve would be extensions that could see some limited use in the odd little piece of performance critical code. It's best hope of success, actually, would be that JRuby and other alternative implementations grow more popular and make it harder for people to rely on C-extensions.

how about Ruby with less magic? http://rubyluwak.com/

> The only way forward for solving this problem is for the People to collectively say, with full knowledge of the potential consequences, that they are absolutely not willing to compromise, and want their government to trade security for inviolable protection of their freedom.

The People did so collectively say: the Bill of Rights, which this president swore to preserve, protect and defend.

I'm talking about now, not 237 years ago.