From: Avdi Grimm <avdi@...>
Date: 2008-03-07T04:19:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Best practices for Ruby Meta-programming

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 1:15 PM, James Britt <james.britt@gmail.com> wrote:
>  Don't be evil.
>
>  Don't be stupid.

So THAT's what I've been doing wrong all this time.  Wish someone had
clued me in sooner.

My concrete contribution to this discussion:

Modules are your friend.  When tempted to dynamically extend a class
with new methods, consider adding them to a module instead
(potentially a dynamically created module using Module.new).  Then use
#include or #extend to add the module to your target.  This has a
number of benefits, including:

 * Clients can clearly see which which methods come from your
extension vs. the methods that are part of the class itself, by using
Ruby's reflection.
 * Clients can override dynamically created methods and still reuse
them with #super() - no need to resort to aliasing.
 * A module can be re-used for either class-wide extension or
extending a single object.

-- 
Avdi