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by ljm 1099 days ago
Pattern matching alone is a huge feature and an absolute delight to use when the opportunity presents itself.

I’d love to see where Ractor goes but I worry it will remain niche, like with Refinements.

2 comments

Agreed. Pattern matching and pipe operator were the two that I hoped for most.

The pipe operator implementation proposal that they team came up with was wrong though and I'm glad they didn't do it. We don't need alternate syntax for `.`, we need ability to chain arguments together in a syntactically pleasant way in a functional style so we don't have to write `first(second(third(arg)))` we can write `arg |> third() |> second() |> first` which is much cleaner and reads left to right like it should

Ruby-idiomatic pipe operator is Object#then. After a lot of design proposals and discussions it is more or less evident no solution other than method would integrate naturally with the rest of the code. So it is just `arg.then{ third(_1)}.then{ second(_1)}.then{ first(_1)}`

Would've been a bit more concise with method references, almost introduced in 2.7, but alas.

(But, well, people tend to want "something that looks like operator, preferably something that looks exactly like |>" and reject every other possibility)

This would be more elegant if there was a better way to do `&object.method(:method_name, …)`. Unbound method support has been around for a long time but converting a method call with arguments to a prod is still not simple to do… unless you start currying methods and writing obscure code.
Yes, that's what I referred to. Before 2.7, object&.:method was almost merged (or rather merged and reverted) because Matz had second thoughts about its uglyness... Which is not completely untrue, but not having a concise way for referring to a method is irritating.

That still wouldn't have solved passing additional args, so maybe { object.method_name(_1, args)} is the next best thing. Though it perceives non-atomic due to wrapping block.

This already exists to some extent, with the >> operator and lambdas.

```

first = ->(x){some code...}

second = ->(x){some code...}

third = ->(x){some code...}

(third >> second >> first).call(arg)

```

I agree it's not as clean as what you propose, but much better imo than traditional nested calls (and Haskell's `.`).

I’ve had a lot of fun with Ruby’s support for functional paradigms but that stuff is unlikely to get through code review when the status quo tends towards ‘Clean Code’ style OOP over-abstraction.

Ruby being a type 2 lisp is a fun one - creating a class and and a factory function with the same name, with argument forwarding:

    class Animal; …; end
    def Animal(…); Animal.new(…); end
Refinements would be more useful if you could expose the refinements, but currently you can't.

    module HashExts
      refine Hash do
        def symbolize_values = transform_values { _1.to_sym }
      end
    end
      
    module Test
      using HashExts
      
      def self.new_h = Hash.new
    end
      
    puts Test.new_h.symbolize_values
    # => undefined method `symbolize_values' for {}:Hash (NoMethodError)
Yeah, I feel like there was a bit of an expectation mismatch around that. `using` makes a lot more semantic sense than `include` or `extend` in a lot of cases but it didn’t play out that way and we’re still living with the unusual convention of making ‘x-able’s and writing ‘concerns’. Not to mention that they were file-scoped and not lexical in their first version so had limited utility for library devs.

As far as I know the teething issues around refinements are ironed out but they remain an obscurity.