Last time, I took a short example and examined in some detail what you would gain by adding static typing to it and what it would cost to use static typing.

I’ve tried writing this literally a half-dozen times. And it always feels like it slips out of control and gets too abstract to be useful.

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.

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...

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.

This is late even by my absurd standards for having this post be late.

Previously in what what I guess is now “The Argument Trilogy”, we talked about:

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…...

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:

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.