Strongly Typed

I've been reading through Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide and came across this passage

Because if itself is an expression, you can get really obscure with statements such as

if artist == "John Coltrane"
  artist = "'Trane"
end unless use_nicknames == "no"

This path leads to the gates of madness.

which made me laugh. But it was also a relief as it seems to indicate that Ruby programmers (perhaps unlike Perl programmers) aren't set on doing things just because they can.