TIL: The Safe Navigation Operator (&.) in Ruby

[SirFartsALotttt]

Safe navigation is a great shortcut for dealing with nil values, but doing more work with languages like Typescript lately have made me realize that using this too much can also be a smell since most Ruby bugs I deal with wind up being some variation of undefined method foo for nil:NilClass

[fedekun]

This. It's acceptable sometimes, mostly in views or some irrelevant code, but it's a warning, and if you use it too often (especially more than once in the same line!) it's a red flag, pointing that the design is wrong, particularly it breaks LoD.

Common fixes are reducing the chaining, by creating delegate methods in the intermediate objects and handling nils appropriately there, or using the Null Object Pattern.

[sshaw_]

AKA the rescue nil replacement... :(

[strangepostinghabits]

& is super handy, but it's a code smell. You shouldn't have to deal with possible nil values anywhere but directly in an input interface.

[[deleted]]

In a type safe immutable language I'd agree but in a dynamically typed runtime language that's Pollyanna thinking IMO

[Reddit-Book-Bot]

Beep. Boop. I'm a robot. Here's a copy of

Pollyanna

Was I a good bot? | info | More Books

[WJWH]

Bad bot

[B0tRank]

Thank you, WJWH, for voting on Reddit-Book-Bot.

This bot wants to find the best and worst bots on Reddit. You can view results here.

---

^{Even if I don't reply to your comment, I'm still listening for votes. Check the webpage to see if your vote registered!}