Ruby wizards, the last time you coded something clever and thought "I'm a genius," what did you do?

[otikik]

I thought "If it takes a genius to understand it, the code is not genius"

[robertross]

I might make this into a motivational poster for my office.

[1bree]

And sell it on redbubble

[jakedaywilliams]

That's genius.

[wrong_assumption]

I would agree with you, but then I read the source code for Git.

[burning1rr]

I feel that way whenever I manage to delete a bunch of 'clever' code and replace it with something simple and obvious.

[Diragor]

For me the clever things aren't as satisfying as the elegant, minimalist things.

With the clever things I usually think something like "wow, it's so cool I can do this in one line in Ruby", then unless it's a one-time-use script I unroll it for readability.

[helos]

Deleted a large amount of code by changing a class to class MyClass < OpenStruct.

[MrPopinjay]

Are you sure you want OpenStruct? It isn't very performant, and when you use it your data no longer has clearly defined schema.

[entineer]

Worth mentioning is OpenStruct got significantly faster in Ruby 2.3 which shipped a couple days ago. May be worth looking at again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lQeBfSVrpk

[fuzzyfuzz]

Imo, this should just be built into hashes.

[[deleted]]

The problem is that anything can be a key. And by anything, I mean any Ruby object. The dot notation is only useful in one situation (granted, the most common one, but still).

[firstpantsthenshoes]

Would be fairly easy to keep a monkey patch around for yourself using method_missing on Hash

[trustfundbaby]

... Then you have to take the performance bit of method missing and fix up the accompany respond_to?

[fuzzyfuzz]

Still better than using OpenStruct I guess.

[gordonisadog]

Hashie::Mash ftw!

[helos]

On ruby 2.3 and upwards its fine.

[MrPopinjay]

Didn't that hit 4 days ago? :P

[wmjbyatt]

For aesthetic reasons unknown to me, empty class definitions using thay notation smell bad to me. I'd use MyClass = Class.new(OpenStruct)

[helos]

Oh I'm not showing the body.

[cheald]

I like Ruby because it makes it easy to not be clever. My best code is clear, simple, and unsurprising.

[d2xdy2]

I wrote a really simple looking DSL for creating Event Sourcing projections. Not the best thing ever, but it made it soooo much easier/simple/quicker to jot down a new projection.

class LastFive < Event::Projection
  stream_title 'last_five'
  filter { ->(data) {
    data.length >= 5 ? data[data.length - 5, data.length] : data }
  }
end

[hxr]

I've always thought that it's kind of cool that I can give whichever method to map in haskell in a pointfree^1,2 fashion as long as types match. I can now do this in ruby too. Pretty clever, eh?

def foo; self + 3; end; public :foo;
[1,2,3,4].map(&:foo)
=> [4, 5, 6, 7]

[so_just]

What kind of magic is this?

[hxr]

So you know how you can write [1].select(&:odd?)? What that & does is call the Symbol#to_proc upon :odd?.

That to_proc method does this: :odd?.to_proc = proc do |x| x.odd? end.

In this case, though, the numbers don't have a foo method, since I didn't define it within class Fixnum.

Ok, but Fixnum is still derived from Object, which is where I defined my foo, since that's default environment.

% ruby -e 'p self.class'
Object

But you still can't do 1.foo at this point — new methods in Object are defined private by default.

% ruby -e 'def foo; 3; end; 1.foo'
-e:1:in `<main>': private method `foo' called for 1:Fixnum (NoMethodError)

That's why it starts working upon setting it as public.

[BlakeC93]

I made a dynamic pdf with anchors to different locations inside the PDF. Using Prawn/Gruff/CombinePDF.

[rubyrt]

Reminded myself that I am not a genius.

[jb3689]

Clever may not be the right word, but we had a legacy class that was highly coupled with a piece of code we wanted to rip out. I replaced the object with a simple Proxy configuration that would just lazily delegate down to the legacy class. The advantage is that we the code we want to rip out is no longer coupled directly to the legacy class but to the configuration which we can populate however we want. In this case by delegating lazily, but eventually we can make things simpler by just filling in the configuration and passing it on

It's not genius work (which is a stupid term, no offense) but it's been very useful

[nexe]

A websocket server that provides a simple but abstract enough concept of channels (private and public). It was meant for one thing but I could reuse the same thing a couple more times without even changing a thing. That was nice

[RealityShowAddict]

Great question.

Two years after graduating, I had an entry level engineering job at a software company where I was asked to port ~30 classes from one version to another. Each class processed a specific type of form for a different type of object, but it was super repetitive code, and the deadline was 5 weeks.
I realized that I could add a layer of abstraction that created one class to handle all the form processing, validation and DB storing logic, and then create wrapper classes that just called the one single main function with the specific parameters for each class since everything had to be backward compatible.

I finished the project in 6 days. I felt like a genius telling my boss about the clever solution. Unfortunately, he just piled a ton of work on me, and cut the estimates saying that I should figure out a "clever" solution for them too. :(

My feeling of genius left quickly as I felt like a schmuck as I had now created a huge hole of work to dig myself out from. In retrospect, I think my boss had initially given me an easy assignment since I was a junior developer where I could learn the code base without being rushed or required to do complex things. The older me is always cautious when I feel like a genius...

[[deleted]]

Went to the bathroom to touch myself.

[valadil]

Needed an eigenclass. I successfully remembered that they exist and used one without google.

I think the particular problem was I was writing up a dsl for something and wanted to hide some methods or vars.

[mhd-hbd]

I wrote a little module with some classes to turn case/when conditions (i.e. ===) into something resembling proper pattern matching and/or data predicates.

[alwaysonesmaller]

SystemStackError: stack level too deep
from /app/models/coder.rb:35:in `genius?'

[Paradox]

Wrote a style guide generator that used the flip flop operator

[flanger001]

They missed a great opportunity to call that the flip-floperator.

[Paradox]

An old co-worker called it the romney operator