The Elements of Style in Ruby #10: In cryptic Perlisms we do not trust

For better or for worse Perl had significant influence over Ruby’s initial design. A lot of things were directly borrowed from Perl, but over the years the Ruby community rejected most of the Perlisms. In this article I’ll go over most of the Perl legacy which you should try to steer clear from.

Global variables

Global variables are the nemesis of object-oriented programming(most OO languages don’t even have the concept of a global variable). Don’t introduce any of those in your Ruby programs! In most cases you can substitute them for module instance variables:

# bad
$foo_bar = 1

#good
module Foo
  class << self
    attr_accessor :bar
  end
end

Foo.bar = 1

Unfortunately, one cannot code Ruby and get away without using the built-in global variables…

Special global variables

Originally Ruby borrowed just about all of Perl’s special global variables, known worldwide for their intention revealing names - $:, $;, $!, $$, $\, etc. I’ve coded Ruby for quite some time now and still can’t remember what half of those meant (and I knew a bit of Perl before I knew any Ruby). Luckily at some point the English library was added to Ruby, which simply adds sensible aliases for the cryptic Perl names. With it you can change this code:

$:.unshift File.dirname(__FILE__)

files = `git ls-files`.split($\)

to:

require 'English'
$LOAD_PATH.unshift File.dirname(__FILE__)

files = `git ls-files`.split($INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR)

I think that the improvement is pretty obvious. Why English is not required by default is beyond me. Personally I use it always and I think you should do the same.

Last regexp captures

When you do a regexp match (like /regexp/ ~= string) a few special global variables with funky names get populated with the prematch, match, postmatch, etc. If the regexp has any groups in it, the stuff they matched gets assigned to other special variables with the descriptive names $1 (for the first group), $2 (for the second group), etc. This idiom is unfortunately very popular with Ruby developers, likely because few of them know of Regexp.last_match.

/(regexp)/ =~ string
...

# this is Perl-style
process $1

# this is the same, but more clear and more object oriented
process Regexp.last_match[1]

Basically you can extract from Regexp.last_match everything you’d get from the special global variables.

Yep, you’ll have to type more, but when clarity is at stake a little bit of extra typing is certainly justified.

You can even go a step further and use the Regexp#match method:

md = /(Bat.+)\s/.match('Batman rules!')
#=> #<MatchData "Batman " 1:"Batman">
md[1]
#=> "Batman"

By the way, keep in mind that it’s generally a good idea to use named regexp groups over positional ones, once you’re dealing with more than two groups. Numbers simply don’t convey that much meaning…

BEGIN/END blocks

Strictly speaking those came from awk, but I still consider them part of the Perl legacy. If you don’t know what I’m talking about feel free to skip this section - your soul has already been saved.

END {
  puts "Exiting..."
}

puts "Processing..."

BEGIN {
  puts "Starting..."
}

BEGIN blocks are executed before everything else in your program in the order in which they are encountered. END blocks are executed right before the program exits. Those hideous constructs mess with the flow of control of the program and are totally useless. I’ve never ever needed a BEGIN block and END blocks are totally replaceable with Kernel#at_exit. I guess they might have some utility for old-school scripting tasks, but application developers should ignore them completely!

Flip-flops

Same as in the previous section - if you don’t know what I’m talking about feel free to skip this section - your soul has already been saved.

Flip-flops are an obscure conditional construct with just a single useful application - text processing:

DATA.each_line do |line|
  print line if (line =~ /begin/)..(line =~ /end/)
end

__END__
0a
1begin
2c
3end
4e
5f
6begin
7end
8i
9j

This will print:

1begin
2c
3end
6begin
7end

Hopefully you’ve managed to deduce how they work from this example, if you haven’t - you’ve just understood what their main problem is.

I never had to use those and probably you won’t have a reason to use them either. Their usage is likely going to do just one thing for you - reduce the readability of the code you’re writing.

Epilogue

I’d really love to see some of those Perlisms out of Ruby - the removal of flip-flops and BEGIN/END gets suggested upstream every now and then and might happen in Ruby 3.0. Removing the global variables, however, is unlikely to ever happen since that would be a huge change.

You can use RuboCop to identify and fix such shortfalls of your code.

As usual I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts here and on Twitter!