✨ What is this post about: As a part of my professional growth, I make time to watch conference talks on Ruby, Rails, JS, React, tech writing, and tech trivia. Previously, I’d just watch them but now I will take and publish notes for future reference. This talk was a part of RailsConf 2021 that I’m participating in at the time of writing.
✨ Talk: ‘Implicit to Explicit: Decoding Ruby’s Magical Syntax’ by Justin Gordon
✨ One-paragraph summary: Ruby’s implicitness makes it great for readability and DSLs. But that also gives Ruby a “magical” syntax compared to JavaScript. In this talk, let’s convert the implicit to explicit in some familiar Rails code. What was “magic” will become simple, understandable code.
✨ Impression: I feel this talk was much more about pry and I am blown away by Justin’s ? ~/.pryrc ? (see below ) and the ease it introduces into debugging ? I loved this talk, and Justin’s way of calm and kind explaining complex concepts.
Table of contents:
Notes
- DSL: Domain-Specific Language
- Rails leverages Ruby’s implicitness:
- self
- variable declarations
- parentheses
- much more
- Can we learn to read Ruby code like the Ruby interpreter?
- ideally, you should understand the code, not just copy-paste
- ? ? ? OMG Justin’s pry demo is a must-watch! I need to re-watch it and code along ? ? ?
JS vs Ruby
- JS is very explicit:
- you need the parentheses for function invocations;
-
thisis rarely implicit; - explicit return in standard functions;
- Ruby is often implicit:
- parentheses are optional and so zero arg method calls are the same as object values (
user.firstcan be a method invocation or just a call for the attribute); -
selfcan be implicit or explicit (it’s explicit for writer methods because otherwise, Ruby’s trying to declare a new local var) - implicit returns;
- parentheses are optional and so zero arg method calls are the same as object values (
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