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0 pointsstu2b505y ago0 comments

Having used Sorbet, one thing immediately noticeable is that it's incredibly verbose due to needing to be valid ruby syntax. Was there any developer pushback on that?

Also, maybe I missed it, but Sorbet has a very fleshed out plugin for VSCode but that's about it. How was the experience getting people who don't use VSCode to integrate it into their workflow?

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ufuk5y ago

There was definitely some general suspicion when we first introduced Sorbet. However, there were also some early adopters who didn't mind the syntax but really wanted the benefits. That's why we didn't push for types adoption, we allowed teams to adopt (or not) at their own pace. Once people saw the benefits, they wanted more of it. Syntax also stopped being a huge concern.

Quoting from the blogpost:

> - Developers get used to Sorbet syntax over time

> ...

> Our main observation is that developers enjoy Sorbet more as the typing coverage increases.

On the editor integration, the funny thing is that VSCode is the only editor that needs a special extension to integrate with Sorbet. The way Sorbet supports editors is via the built-in Language Server Protocol (LSP) mode which can be used with any LSP plugin for any editor. I know people who are using it with Vim, Sublime Text, etc. Integration is, in a nutshell, running `srb tc --lsp` as a subcommand and piping data in/out via stdin/out. Our tool Spoom actually uses the same LSP mode to provide extra developer tools and analysis on top of Sorbet.

darkdimius5y ago

Dmitry here, from Stripe. One of founding members of Sorbet(though I no longer work on it anymore).

Story that Ufuk shares is common.

We saw this process repeat in many companies, Stripe, Shopify and many others - folks are initially bothered with verbosity of `sig` syntax, but as the company starts using it in practice stop being bothered pretty quikcly. It happens even faster now that IDE integration allows to auto-complete entire signature and can in most cases correctly guess the types of arguments & result type. You rarely type `sig`s yourself.

The common internal asks at Stripe are about even better IDE support, new features & etc and that's where most of investments are. Well, and and obviously performance. Sorbet was already very fast and we intend to keep it fast as our huge codebase grows.

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