From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2009-11-15T03:21:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Naming conventions -- was: Re: DRYing a Regex

Hi --

On Sat, 14 Nov 2009, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

> James Edward Gray II wrote:
> [...]
>>> Even Apps Hungarian is not a great idea in OO code.  Instead, just use
>>> the type system, so that distance would be a Kilometer object and
>>> correction would be a Foot object.  Kilometer.+(foot) could then either
>>> raise an exception or invoke a conversion.
>>
>> I would like to see us move away from considering classes to be types at
>> all in Ruby.  Who knows what modules an object has mixed into it and who
>> knows what singleton methods are defined on it.
>
> Do you make much use of singleton mixins or singleton methods in your
> code?  I know I don't.

I write class methods sometimes (I know those are singleton with an
asterisk next to them, but still), and I think that extending core
objects with modules is a frequently overlooked and very powerful
alternative to reopening core classes and adding methods.

This kind of thing:

   class String
     def method_I_need_once_or_twice
     ...

is almost always overkill. It's sort of the core-functionality
counterpart of using global variables. Extending an object is a much
more precise operation -- and has the additional merit, I find, of
really making you think about whether it's worth bothering to the
extend the object instead of working with what the object can already
do.


David

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