Noel Rappin Writes Here

Last time around, we got to Better Know access control in Ruby, and I started to write my opinion on the use of private methods in Ruby, but my position/argument/rant had gotten out of hand and so I spun it off into its own post. This is that post. It’s long enough as it is, let’s just get to it, we’ll skip the internal ad. What I think about Private Methods in Ruby In Ruby, a method without side effects should be public.

I’ll be honest, I picked this topic out of the half-dozen or so Better Know A Ruby Things on my to-do list strictly because it’s maybe the only Ruby take that I genuinely argue with people about. To be even more honest, it got away from me a bit as I started writing the argument: which is why I tend to avoid declaring methods private. I know these newsletters have tended toward long, but 3100+ words was a bit much even for me, so I’ve split it in half.

If your organization has coders continually getting in each other’s way, or if you make a change to part of your code base and don’t know who needs to review it, or if you have code that nobody maintains because everybody owns it… you may be violating Conway’s Law. Hi – I thought I’d do something a little different this time. We’ll be back to more Better Know Ruby things next time, but I’ve been sitting on this essay for a while and wanted it to get out.

This is late even by my absurd standards for having this post be late. I have a good excuse – I got on to TikTok. And not that I wasted a bunch of time on TikTok, but that I started to see a lot of BookTok videos, where a lot of very earnest people would talk about their 5-star-books for November or whatever. And I thought, “Do I sound like that?

Previously in what what I guess is now “The Argument Trilogy”, we talked about: Positional Arguments Keyword Arguments And now the trilogy now comes to its inevitable conclusion with “Return of The Jedi” block arguments. In the interest of keeping this thing within the plausible word count of a newsletter, we’re not going to talk about what blocks are or the way blocks behave here, that’ll be a future Better Know, but we do need to talk about block syntax.

Last time on Better Know A Ruby Thing, we covered positional arguments, and now we’re going to move on to keyword arguments. I really did think this was going to be shorter than the last one, and then I got to the conversion between keyword and positional arguments, and then… well, it’s not shorter. (I know I said the next newsletter was going to be Conway’s Law, that’s coming, but this one moved along faster…)

Ruby has three ways to pass information from a method call to a method definition: positional arguments, keyword arguments, and block arguments. Each of these ways has: A syntax to declare an argument of that type in a method definition A syntax to declare an argument of that type in a method call A class that can can be used to convert arbitrary objects into and out of method calls A text marker that is associated with that kind of argument, *, **, or &.

I am extremely excited to say that Programming Ruby 3.3, also known as The Pickaxe Book, is now done done, finished, completely available as an ebook, and winding its way to distributors to ship to people as a genuine physical book. The PDF and ePub versions of the book are available at Pragmatic’s website. The print book should be available wherever you get print books, including Amazon and Bookshop. I’ve talked in the past about what’s in the book, what’s new, and whether you should buy it.

You have a series of test cases. They cover the same logic with different inputs. In order to get to that logic, there’s some overhead: objects have to be created first. Then there’s more logic needed to evaluate the result. What’s the best way to manage these tests? You want it to be easy to add new tests. You also want it to be clear what part of the test is different in each round and what part is just the common logistics.

Sorry for skipping a week or two – I was approving copyedits on the book that is now called Programming Ruby 3.3, because we now want to be proactive about the next release. Coincidentally, the copyedit review does relate to this newsletter. I noticed a particular code sample as I was going through the book again, and it highlights a feature of Ruby’s constant lookup that I didn’t discuss last time.