[86J8oyZv]

In Ruby it’s “require” rather than “import.” But it would be more like “require bar; foo()”.

However, Ruby does have auto-loading conventions. So you could define “module Baz{ module Bar { def foo end; } }” in “baz/bar.rb” from the root of your project. You should then be able to call “Baz::Bar::foo()” from any other file in your project structure without a “require” at all. This is not standard Ruby IIRC, but Rails and other frameworks use it.

[khaledh]

> You should then be able to call “Baz::Bar::foo()” from any other file in your project structure without a “require” at all.

IMO, this is a downside rather than an upside. It's optimizing for writing rather than reading. This hurts understandability for someone who is not familiar with the code base.

[jonnytran]

IMO, Ruby optimizes for reading. You simply cannot write concise code in Python as in Ruby. One reason (of many) is because of all the import statements required in Python. In Ruby, there is often only a single require statement, or maybe none at all, at the top of a file.

The difference is convention over configuration. In Ruby, if you know the convention, then you know exactly where everything is defined without needing to read it. In Python, you must read all those import statements to know where something is coming from, not to mention write them in the first place.

And if you really need to know where something is defined, you simply ask it.

    puts obj.method(:foo).source_location

So IMO, Ruby optimizes for both reading and writing.

[gls2ro]

There is a gem that does that used by Rails and multiple other gems:

https://github.com/fxn/zeitwerk

It is pretty easy to set it up in any Ruby project.

[dragonwriter]

it would actually be:

  require 'bar'

  foo

because require is a regular method and the argument is a string (I mean, you could pass bar without quotes if the string was in a variable called bar, but that's not the scenario being discussed.)

> However, Ruby does have auto-loading conventions. So you could define “module Baz{ module Bar { def foo end; } }” in “baz/bar.rb” from the root of your project. You should then be able to call “Baz::Bar::foo()” from any other file in your project structure without a “require” at all. This is not standard Ruby IIRC

autoload is a Kernel method in Ruby core, so it is standard Ruby, but you have to explicitly register a file to be automatically loaded when a particular method is referenced.

Some systems additionally include code that does this for source files based on path.