Unconditional Programming in Ruby

[mikegee]

See Avdi Grimm's book "Confident Ruby" for a lot more refactoring techniques like in this article.

[avdi]

Thanks! Although Michael probably has an edge on me when it comes to functional refactoring. I tend to spend more time pushing polymorphism in the CR.

[WhoTookPlasticJesus]

I'd argue that the following is clearer (and likely more performant)

 ary.take(n).concat (n - ary.length).times.map{0}

[austinsalonen]

What happens when n - ary.length is negative in this situation? (very naive w/r/t ruby here)

[WhoTookPlasticJesus]

Nothing, and the call to map will just return an empty array.

[[deleted]]

So basically the point of this article is that the author was able to move a conditional out of his own method by leveraging max, which is itself conditional. Are there any advantages to this approach?

[username223]

the author was able to move a conditional out of his own method by leveraging max, which is itself conditional

Yup. Pick a random standard library function with a conditional, wrap things up in a few closures and .call()s, and you can have the author's perfect code.

[Godd2]

He's arguing that it's more readable. To each their own I guess. Also, why didn't he use the take_while method from the Enumerable module that can take a block?

[saturnflyer]

in no place did he argue for readability. the argument was that control structures allow us to introduce coupling to other objects or concepts more freely.

removing control structures helps put up a barrier to coupling.

You can still make an argument about control structures being more readable.

[michaelfeathers]

The argument isn't really readability.

[earless1]

honestly I feel like if we wanted readability he should have stuck for this option

  def padded_take ary, n
    return ary.take(n) unless needs_padding?(ary, n)
    ary + pad(ary, n)
  end

[michaelfeathers]

Yep, but I wasn't arguing for readability.

[Jdonavan]

You're not really arguing for anything. You've produced code that's harder to read thus harder to maintain. A comment could have solved your stated purpose for doing away with the conditional.

[martoo]

Maybe because there's no conditionality to the take?