[emodendroket]

Of the many models of “composition” that are possible I think Ruby’s free-for-all blend of mix-ins and monkey patches is the only one that can drive a maintenance programmer more insane than a deep hierarchy of inheritance of Java classes.

[shagie]

    irb(main):001:0> "bar".foo
    Traceback (most recent call last):
            4: from /usr/bin/irb:23:in `<main>'
            3: from /usr/bin/irb:23:in `load'
            2: from /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.6.0/gems/irb-1.0.0/exe/irb:11:in `<top (required)>'
            1: from (irb):1
    NoMethodError (undefined method `foo' for "bar":String)
    Did you mean?  for
    irb(main):002:0> class String
    irb(main):003:1> def foo
    irb(main):004:2> "foobar!"
    irb(main):005:2> end
    irb(main):006:1> end
    => :foo
    irb(main):007:0> "bar".foo
    => "foobar!"
    irb(main):008:0> 

Yes! Let's modify the core library String class on the fly to add new functions to it.

There are things about ruby that truly scare me if my goal was to write secure and reasonable code.

[psychoslave]

This doesn’t leverage on the more subtle but all the more elegant type system that Ruby provides. As told just above, since all object also have their own class instance you can extend this instance specific class without polluting the general class it derives from.

  irb(main):001:1* module Awesomeness
  irb(main):002:1*   def awesome? = :yes
  irb(main):003:0> end

  => :awesome?
  irb(main):004:0> ?Ô.awesome?
  (irb):4:in `<main>': undefined method `awesome?' for "Ô":String (NoMethodError)
          from /Users/someone/.asdf/installs/ruby/3.1.2/lib/ruby/gems/3.1.0/gems/irb-1.4.1/exe/irb:11:in `<top (required)>'
          from /Users/someone/.asdf/installs/ruby/3.1.2/bin/irb:25:in `load'
          from /Users/someone/.asdf/installs/ruby/3.1.2/bin/irb:25:in `<main>'

  irb(main):005:0> ?Ô.extend(Awesomeness).awesome?
  => :yes

  irb(main):005:0> ?Ô.awesome?
  (irb):5:in `<main>': undefined method `awesome?' for "Ô":String (NoMethodError)
          from /Users/someone/.asdf/installs/ruby/3.1.2/lib/ruby/gems/3.1.0/gems/irb-1.4.1/exe/irb:11:in `<top (required)>'
          from /Users/someone/.asdf/installs/ruby/3.1.2/bin/irb:25:in `load'
          from /Users/someone/.asdf/installs/ruby/3.1.2/bin/irb:25:in `<main>'

[emodendroket]

Right, that’s monkey patching. You run into the real problems when you have multiple people wanting to add them.

Ruby isn’t alone in supporting this functionality (you can fiddle with JavaScript prototypes, for instance), but I think it is unique how much it is encouraged (at least in Rails world). I think extension methods are a much better model to achieve something similar.

[shagie]

There are also some really weird/powerful/voodoo things that you can do when that is combined with the first class environments.

The "why Scheme didn't do this": First-class environments - http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/09/first-class-environments...

why Ruby did (and wasn't a good idea): Ruby Conf 2011 Keeping Ruby Reasonable https://youtu.be/vbX5BVCKiNs

Consider where you can slip in a block invocation and the following code:

    def mal(&block)
        block.call
        block.binding.eval('a = 43')
    end

    a = 42
    puts a
    mal do 
      puts 1
    end
    puts a

and that that means that you've got full access to be able to inspect and manipulate all of the variables in scope at the time of the invocation. While that example is rather obvious, it can be done much more subtly too.

The power of ruby to do meta programming and by extension some really neat DSLs also provides it with some dangerous tools that are otherwise rather difficult to track down.

[projektfu]

This is the Smalltalkiness of Ruby. Why have a separate place to put a function that operates only on strings when you can put it in String?

Of course, in Smalltalk you might have #trim defined by two different packages and they might conflict. Then what? Maybe you have to manage that complexity. However, it's not much different from having conflicting functions in the global namespace in C, but actually easier to resolve in a given situation.

[emodendroket]

Well, I suppose that's compelling if you're one of the many programmers trying to decide if you will implement your project in Ruby or C.

[projektfu]

Yeah, more modern Smalltalks are able to put things in various namespaces so they don't conflict but still generally work as expected. In Smalltalk, adding methods doesn't weigh down a class like in other languages, because method lookup is on-the-fly like in Objective-C, not precalculated and placed in a table.