Codefol.io

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another’s code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.

Ruby, on the other hand, is an experiment in “give every toddler a chainsaw”...

ruby rubycommunity

If you’ve never built a Ruby gem, go do that first. It’s amazingly easy. And it lets other people use your stuff!

When you do you’ll have to figure out – how much goes into one gem? What should you cut up into new gems?

Here’s how you tell.

What’s the Big Idea?

You want your gem to have one...

ruby

Ruby lets you hook in and see (and change!) a lot of behavior of the core language. Methods, constants, classes, variables… Ruby lets you query them all, and change a lot about them.

These are just hooks – things Ruby calls in response to something happening. That’s different from, say, all the methods you can call to find our what’s defined and how – like instance variables, or method bindings, or…

Here’s summaries and links for all the hooks I could find (thanks to Google and StackOverflow!):

ruby metaprogramming

There’s a semi-famous book, The Art of the Metaobject Protocol by Kiczales, des Rivieres and Bobrow. Alan Kay, the guy who invented SmallTalk and the phrase “Object Oriented”, called it the best book in ten years.

But it’s takes some describing.

What is a Metaobject Protocol?

You know how Ruby has a class called “Class”? And how all classes are instances of it? And how Class is a subclass of Module?

The Metaobject protocol asks, “what if there were more subclasses of Class? And you could make classes from them, instead of plain old Class?”

Also, it includes what we’d now call introspection functions – they didn’t usually call it that twenty years ago when this was published.

But what, specifically, does that mean?

ruby metaprogramming

Five minutes on the Internet will find you somebody who thinks Ruby shouldn’t exist and is clearly inferior (try it!). Or pick a big tech company, especially an “Enterprise” company. Same thing – you’ll find a Ruby-hater in five minutes if you’re actually trying.

If Rubyists keep doing the right thing, this will be true forever. Let me explain.

What Ruby Rocks At

There’s a set of things Ruby is really good at. I’ll list some of them:

• Prototyping new ideas
• Anything web or HTTP
• Stuff that doesn’t need to be fast
• Reading other people’s code - Ruby is short and readable.
• Building tools and libraries, especially DSLs.

There are some other things Ruby is “good” at. Like, it’s good at them but many people think they’re a bad idea. I’ll list some of those, too:

ruby rubycommunity

Ruby and Python, so similar and so different. By which I mean, “the languages let you do the same things in most of the same ways, but the communities are utterly different.”

Community Mores

Python says, there should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it.

Ruby, like Perl, says...

ruby rubycommunity

A reader asked me for quick recommendations on writing clean code. Here’s what I wrote back:

Clean code can be a number of things. For instance, a classmate of mine named Jim Gay likes a pattern called DCI for separation of concerns, and wrote a book about it (http://clean-ruby.com/).

But you...

ruby

This idea was rejected by GoGaRuCo (link to part one) as a talk. So you get to see it on this blog!

Quick summary: I’ve got a thing with a background thread. Clearly the code could have things go wrong. Oh Jeebus, how do I test it?

You can check out Hastur’s Ruby client as an example here – it has...

ruby

I proposed a talk for the Golden Gate Ruby Conference, and got turned down. Usually that’s it, but the excellent and classy Josh Susser offered to say why he’d turned people down (woot!). He said:

I think we had a good idea of what your talk would be about. But this year we are a bit tired of testing...

ruby

I love looking at problems with “no solution” in languages to stretch my mind. Here’s a fun one from Ruby.

In Ruby, there’s not a good way to map over a subclass of Array and get the same subclass back.

That is, if you start with this code:

class Array
  def but_doubled
    map { |x| x * 2 }
 ...

ruby