I'm still trying to make sense of this announcement. With a lack of type annotation in the Ruby core, I chose to build off YARD to make gradual type safety work. Now I don't know if there will be a standard that supports type safety or if I should continue down the path I'm already following. Help me, Ruby core developers. You're my only hope.
Personally, I think you should keep using YARD, because people are bound to be using Ruby <3.0 for a while. As an aside, thanks for solargraph! I can't recommend it enough.
I hear you. It occurred to me that Ruby could have chosen to innovate with something like a Semantic TomDoc. To choose a separate file based approach seems like a step backward. At the very least it could have been module based. But Matz is a C coder -- not a Ruby coder. So it doesn't necessarily surprise me.
It's sad though. Since poor design of Refinements, C transpiling for 3x project, and now this, I am less and less inclined to continue using Ruby. I miss some of the dynamics but I find myself using Crystal instead.
(Honestly, if any one figured out a way to supplement Crystal with dynamic behavior for those features that a static language can't offer, Ruby would be done.)
As soon as I feel comfortable maintaining a Crystal server in production I think I'll switch to it. Last I tried it, things broke and shards required some effort to maintain every version update. I'm eagerly looking forward to their 1.0 and hoping they stabilize a lot more.
Please don’t use YARD. As a documentation format, I find it noisy. As a documentation generator, it doesn’t support standard RDoc syntax (_intentionally_ so) that makes it completely useless.
I say this as someone who has written Ruby for almost twenty years. I will _never_ use a tool that depends on YARD document formatting, because I will never use YARD document formatting.
(edit: I should have explained that I'm talking about the type checking features I'm developing in Solargraph: https://solargraph.org/guides/type-checking)