I guess it depends on how one defines "productivity:" is it spitting out code as fast as your keyboard works, or is is not having features do weirdo things because who can reasonably say what the code does at any given time?
I have more than once tried to contribute fixes to GitLab's codebase, and every time I open the thing in RubyMine it hurpdurps having no earthly idea where symbols come from or what completions are legal in any given context. I trust JetBrains analysis deeply, so if they can't deduce what's going on, then it must take an impressive amount of glucose to memorize every single surface area one needs to implement a feature. That or, hear me out, maybe "it works on my machine" is a close to correct as the language is going to get without explicit type hints as a pseudo static typing
Bugs exist in all code written in all programming languages and you will find bugs in programs written in statically typed languages too as you know. Programming languages are rarely chosen for the absense of bugs alone though or we'd all be using SPARK Ada or something.
> spitting out code as fast as your keyboard works, or is is not having features do weirdo things
This is a straw man. No-one has suggested that "spitting out code as fast as your keyboard works" is what Rails allows you to do, or that Ruby code results in features that "do weirdo things".
In reality engineer productivity is important and Rails enables it in a web environment.
> I have more than once tried to contribute fixes to GitLab's codebase, and every time I open the thing in RubyMine it hurpdurps having no earthly idea where symbols come from or what completions are legal in any given context.
Yes, I prefer writing statically typed languages and I would /greatly/ prefer Ruby to be statically typed for a number of reasons, but it will likely never be so in a way I consider to be usable (see https://github.com/ruby/rbs). Not being able to definitively tell what a method returns or where one is defined is a total PITA, but it's one of the array of up and downsides to Ruby, with each language having a different set.
> I trust JetBrains analysis deeply, so if they can't deduce what's going on, then it must take an impressive amount of glucose to memorize every single surface area one needs to implement a feature.
You don't need to know how all of Rails works to write a Rails app, as I'm sure you know, so this seems like another mis-representation of the truth, just as you don't need to know how the compiler or CPUs work to do a lot of (most?) programming.
> That or, hear me out, maybe "it works on my machine" is a close to correct as the language is going to get without explicit type hints as a pseudo static typing
You seem to be suggesting that Ruby on Rails applications behave unpredictably on a machine to machine basis but that's not really how Ruby works in practice, or matching on my experience.
I would like to challenge that.