Rabbit Creative

An avid Rubyist proposes a very interesting #as method. It definitely looks rubyesque, but others disagree, namely James Gray and a bright fellow named Ara.

The original posting that generated a lot of good debate on the merits of such an approach.

The OP’s second attempt at gaining the hearts of others, only to be fucking smashed by Ara. Beautiful.

I don’t mean to be sensational about it, but the code presented by Ara was simply gorgeous. It reeked of solid programming and, more importantly, a fundamental understanding that if you’re resorting to “neat tricks,” you your code needs to be smothered into submission.

That said, I still like the idea of #as. It’s different, and there are some drawbacks (mentioned on the forum), but I think it’s worth feeling out. It’s easy as hell to implement:

class Object
 
  def as
    yield(self)
  end
 
end

So it’s worth trying.

Here are the two examples in question.

Ara’s suggestion (”traditional” method, in my mind):

guesses = stems.map{|stem| "#{ stem }.#{ guess_extension stem }"}
basenames = transform2 source_files + transform1(guesses)
expanded = basenames.map{|basename| File.join dir basename}

FC’s suggestion with #as:

expanded = stems.map { |stem|
  "#{ stem }.#{ guess_extension stem }"
}.as { |guesses|
  transform2(source_files + transform1(guesses))
}.as { |basenames|
  basenames.map { |basename|
    File.join dir, basename
  }
}

Now, I will not use curly braces for multi-line blocks. Forget about it. Here’s what it looks like with do…end.

expanded = stems.map do |stem|
  "#{ stem }.#{ guess_extension stem }"
end.as do |guesses|
  transform2(source_files + transform1(guesses))
end.as do |basenames|
  basenames.map do |basename|
    File.join dir, basename
  end
end

Not so pretty, is it? It’s definitely less sentence-like than with curly braces.

In the end I suppose it comes down to style and being flexible. If I were so dead-set against { and } for multi-line blocks I could definitely see using it. On the other hand I question my conviction in that area… is it worth missing out on a potentially useful feature just to follow dogma?

Programming. It’s definitely an art.