The Elements of Style in Ruby #6: Attributes Redux
Today we’ll talk about attributes in Ruby. Let’s start with the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide: Use the attr family of functions to define trivial accessors or mutators. Everyone w...
(think)
The Elements of Style in Ruby #5: Readability of long numeric literals
Today’s topic is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide: Add underscores to large numeric literals to improve their readability. Most of the programs we write feature a substantial numb...
RuboCop 0.9 is now patrolling the streets!
RuboCop 0.9 is finally out! This was one of our most ambitious releases - over a month of work, ~250 commits, lots of new cops and features and a lot less bugs.1 Here’s the highlights. Portable Li...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #4: Array#join vs Array#*
Today’s topic is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide: Favor the use of Array#join over the fairly cryptic Array#* with a string argument. Array#join and Array#* (with a string argume...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #3: Make sure something is an array
The subject of today’s post is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide: Use [*var] or Array() instead of an explicit Array check, when dealing with a </br> variable you want to treat...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #2: Favor sprintf(format) over String#%
Today’s topic is the following rule from the Ruby Style Guide: Favor the use of sprintf and its alias format over the fairly </br> cryptic String#% method. Kernel#sprintf and String#% b...
The Elements of Style in Ruby #1: Maximum line length
Welcome to the first installment of The Elements of Style in Ruby. We’ll start off with something pretty generic, that’s not specific to Ruby at all - the maximum line length that’s acceptable in ...
The Elements of Style in Ruby: An Essay in N parts
The Ruby Style Guide is nearing its second birthday. The project has gained more attention and more traction than I could have imagined. For the millionth time I was amazed by the fantastic Ruby de...
RuboCop 0.8.0 is out, support for JRuby and Rubinius is in!
RuboCop 0.8.0 is out! While the version bump is minor, this release represents an almost total rewrite of the code. We’ve moved away from MRI’s Ripper parser and ported RuboCop to Peter Zotov’s fa...
WikEmacs lives on under new stewardship
Several months passed since I stated my intent to shutdown WikEmacs. While I still consider the project a failed experiment and stand by everything I wrote in that post, I have received since lots ...