unbound imagination - a blog about programming

What Rails Has Taught Me

July 07, 2008

For roughly 2 years now, I, among many many others, have been working with the Ruby on Rails framework. During this period Rails has evolved in many aspects including but not limited to design principles, deployment strategies, and development styles. For example, in 2006 (or maybe earlier) DHH (the creator of Rails) became an advocate of REST and thus implementing it into the framework. Although the REST principle has been around for a while, it was new to a lot of Rails developers. In addition to changes in framework itself, the Rails community has picked up some other interests like switching to the Git version control system. Anyway, getting to the obvious non-point: Rails is a fast-paced community.

So, Why Bring This Up?

I started working at a company where nothing is written in Ruby (which is what I've been mainly using for a while now). And all the source code is in a different version control system than I'm used to. And the list goes on. Naturally, there is a learning curve for all this and its slope will vary per-person. But luckily, since I've spent the last 2 years following and constantly learning from this fast-paced Rails community, I've been able to adapt pretty quickly and learn a lot in the past couple weeks.

Moral of the Story

Don't be afraid of learning new things. Always learn new things.

Monkey Patching Galore

March 03, 2008

Here is some code I just threw together for fun, I don't actually use it. Some would call this monkey patching.

   1  class Symbol
   2    def to_proc
   3      Proc.new { |*args| args.shift.__send__(self, *args) } 
   4    end
   5  end
   6  
   7  class Array
   8    def all?(*args, &block)
   9      !!self.each { |e| return false unless block.call(e, *args) } 
  10    end
  11    
  12    def array_of?(klass)
  13      self.all?(klass, &:is_a?)
  14    end
  15  end
  16  
  17  
  18  puts ["Will", "this", "work?"].array_of?(String) # => true
  19  
  20  puts ["But", "this", 1, "will", "be false"].array_of?(String) # => false
  21  
  22  puts ["But", "wait", "this still works"].all?(&:to_s) # => true

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