Dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, and JavaScript determine the types of variables at runtime

rather than at compile time. This flexibility allows for rapid development and concise code,

but it also makes it harder to catch certain classes of bugs before execution. Type checkers

for dynamic languages add structure and safety without compromising their expressive power.

Sorbet is a static type checker developed by the Stripe team and designed specifically for Ruby.

The motivation behind Sorbet stemmed from the growing complexity of production Ruby applications,

where developers needed stronger guarantees and more

scalable code quality tools than dynamic typing alone could offer. Jake Zimmerman is a software

engineer at Stripe and leads development on Sorbet. He joins the podcast with Josh Goldberg to discuss

his background. The challenges of typing in Ruby, the motivation behind

Sorbet, its architecture, performance optimizations, and more. This episode is hosted by Josh Goldberg,

an independent full-time open-source developer. Josh works on projects in the TypeScript ecosystem,

most notably TypeScript ESLint, a powerful static analysis tool set for JavaScript and TypeScript.

He is also the author of the O'Reilly Learning TypeScript book, a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies, and a co-founder of SquiggleConf, a conference for excellent web developer tooling.

Find Josh on Blue Sky, Fosterdon, and dot com as Joshua K. Goldberg. With me today is Jake Zimmerman, developer at Stripe on Sorbet and Ruby Infrastructure.

Jake, welcome to Software Engineering Daily.

Awesome.

Thanks for having me, Josh.

We're really excited.

You do a lot of really interesting work, and you have a long history of very fascinating blog posts.

But before we get into Sorbet and type checking and Ruby,

can you tell us how did you get into tech? Oh, sure. It's a long story. It goes back all the

...