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by ploxiln 3972 days ago
It's the wrong way to think about organization of logic.

It's not a number's place to know how to do looping, it's not an object's place to know whether it's nil or not. Why would every single object have a "nil?" method?

You can make it work, but it's just not good style (and it doesn't serve the purpose of implementation efficiency or machine-sympathy, which I would give exception for).

(also, special characters in method names?! my complaints about ruby really don't end with these comments, these are just the most succinct ones)
3 comments
dragonwriter 3972 days ago
> It's the wrong way to think about organization of logic.

This is not an objective statement, it is one of subjective preference, about which people (demonstrably, by the very existence of Ruby) disagree. The right way to think about organization of logic is not an objective fact, and...

> You can make it work, but it's just not good style

...neither is "style".

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epidemian 3972 days ago
> It's not a number's place to know how to do looping

If we consider a number as "zero or 1 plus a number", then the "Number" class could very well be the one that knows how to execute a piece of code a number times given that representation. It's actually pretty similar to the Church encoding of numbers in the lambda calculus[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding

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skywhopper 3972 days ago
The number doesn't know how to loop. `100.times` returns an enumerator that can then be iterated upon. In real code, that particular method doesn't get used all that much, but its existence tells you nothing about Ruby's design.

Why shouldn't every single object have a 'nil?' method? It can be very useful. Think about operating on a collection of objects with `map` or `collect` or whatever your favorite language calls it. No need to write code, just send the `:nil?` message to every object, which you can do with one line.

You're right that "everything is an object" is not the most performant way to build a runtime, but it suits the purposes for which Ruby was designed very well. Just because you don't value those priorities doesn't mean others do not.

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