[jballanc]

MyModule.camelize doesn't support polymorphism (you could even call it procedural programming in a OOP shell), but something like Camelizable.new(my_string).camelize does. I'm still convinced that what Ruby needs is more object composition (and maybe a way to override default literal construction), and that refinements are a cannon to shoot a mosquito.

[riffraff]

Camelizable.new(my_string).camelize does not support polymorphism, because it does not depend on the type of my_string.

Which means if I want to add camelizable to my AnnotatedString I have to monkey patch Camelizable#initialize.

[jballanc]

No, it means that the implementation of Camelizable#camelize needs to be polymorphic w.r.t. my_string. Since Ruby is duck-typed, presumably the implementation of "camelize" would first check to see if the receiver responded to "gsub", then do the necessary substitutions. (Actually, a better implementation would be to first check if my_string responds to "camelize" and call that directly if it does.) In the end, this is a classic decorator pattern.

[riffraff]

if you go the way of a decorator pattern, say, I write my `IntegerCamelDecorator` since your `Camelizable.new` does not support numbers, then what is the point of `Camelizable` to start with? You can just have a mirror hierarchy of `CamelAdapters`.

Of course, you can implement `Camelizable.new` so that it performs a dynamic dispatch itself, by looking up in a `CamelizableRegistry`. You can even have this built up magically with reflection.

You can, of course do everything, but a method call in ruby still only dispatches on self, and if that is fixed the method cannot be polymorphic, if you think otherwise we can agree to disagree.

[jballanc]

You're focusing on the #new call. The actual #camelize call is still dispatching based on the Camelizable object which is parameterized with my_string. Ok, so it's not true call-site polymorphism...fine. I'd argue that's an unimportant implementation detail, but if you prefer (and what I frequently do in my own code) you could have something more like:

    Camelizable(my_string).camelize

where now Camelizable does the dynamic class lookup to choose the correct decorator for my_string. This turns #camelize into a truly call-site polymorphic call and, at least in my opinion, is far more readable/reasonable than either monkeypatching or refinements.