Billing::Plan::Factory.find_or_create_by!(
name: :pro,
interval: 1.month,
amount: 50
)
It is not only the verbosity or use of trailing '!' in a method
for no real reason, IMO, but also things such as "1.month". I
understand that rails thrives as a DSL, but to me having a method
such as .month on an Integer, is simply wrong. Same with
HashWithIndifferentAccess - I understand the point, to not have
to care whether a key is a String or a Symbol, but it is simply
the wrong way to think about this. People who use HashWithIndifferentAccess
do not understand Symbols.It's not that different from `1.times` or `90.chr` which are vanilla Ruby.
> HashWithIndifferentAccess
HashWithIndifferentAccess was an unfortunate necessity to avoid DOS attacks when Symbols used to be immortal. There's no longer a reason to use it today, except for backward compatibility.
Putting this kind of type-based 'magic' in the code is a bad decision that will bite you very soon. It optimizes for being 'cute' rather than being clear and maintainable, and that's a trade-off that almost never pays off.
dudeinjapan•1h ago
rubyn00bie•1h ago
onli•42m ago
shevy-java•41m ago
But nobody forces you to use a DSL such as rails, so I am not sure why ruby should be hated for this when it is a rails dev who does that.
The blog has much more to do with rails than ruby; such API design is really strange.
I don't think this design causes problems as such, but it is too verbose and way too ugly. To me it seems that they are just shuffling data structures around; that could even be solved via yaml files.
molf•34m ago
I don't know its history well enough, but it seems to originate from Lisp. PG wrote about it before [1].
It can result in code that is extremely easy to read and reason about. It can also be incredibly messy. I have seen lots of examples of both over the years.
It is the polar opposite of Go's philosophy (be explicit & favour predictability across all codebases over expressiveness).
[1]: https://paulgraham.com/progbot.html
dudeinjapan•11m ago
If there is a DSL such as Rails’ URL routing, which will be the same in every app—this is also fine.
When one makes 100s of micro-DSLs for object creation, that are only ever used in one or two places—this is pure madness.