From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2011-04-18T17:41:56+09:00
Subject: Re: To Yield or Not to Yield: An Inferable Question


On Apr 17, 2011, at 14:40 , Michael Edgar wrote:

> Hi Brian – Thanks for sharing your thoughts!  Since much of what you note
> is commonly accepted about Ruby, I am happy that my research is
> subtle enough to warrant such discussion (and interesting enough to get
> an e-mail or two!) 
> 
> If you don't mind, I'd like to write a blog post sharing your concerns
> (anonymized, naturally) and my responses. Would that be okay?
> 
>> Points I'd raise:
>> 
>> 1. In my experience, very little real-world Ruby code uses 
>> 'block_given?'. If it needs to yield, it just yields. I'd consider this 
>> to be a case of duck-typing.
> 
> This seems to suggest Rubyists rarely write methods that take blocks
> optionally. Of this, I am highly skeptical. 

You should be highly skeptical.

From our seattle.rb projects:

% ack -l block_given? */dev/{lib,test} | wc -l
      28

And from my gauntlet setup:

% ls | wc -l
   20245
% find ~/.gauntlet -type f | xargs zgrep -l block_given? | wc -l
    4715

So roughly 1 in 4 gems in my gauntlet downloads use block_given?

I think that makes it clear that your work can provide a lot of insight.