Modeling the World with Prototypes
This post started out as the second half of an article on prototype-based OO design for Gregory Brown’s Practicing Ruby. For an introduction to the prototyped view of the object…
“Classes vs. Prototypes – Some Philosophical and Historical Observations”
Thanks to Roberto Guerra on the Objects on Rails mailing list for making me aware of this fascinating paper: The distinction between class-based and prototype-based systems reflects a long-lasting philosophical…
Early access beta of “Objects on Rails” Now Available
UPDATE: Objects on Rails is now complete and freely available online. Often, at conferences and users group meetings, I find myself discussing the intersection of Ruby on Rails, Object-Oriented development, and Test-Driven…
Demeter: It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.
Is #try really so bad? In response to my recent post about #try being a code smell, a lot of people made the reasonable objection that the example I used—of…
Null Objects and Falsiness
Thank you to Ben Hamill for sending me a question that prompted this post. Checking for object presence Very often in Ruby code, we would like to execute some action…
Checking the existence of a super method in Ruby
Ruby gives methods the ability to call up to the superclass definition of themselves. Or it may not be a parent class definition; it might call up to a definition…
Testing Private Methods
Periodically the question of how to test private methods comes up at work or online. My answer is: don’t. It may seem trite, but there is some reasoning behind it….