alt Hacker NewsFrameworks and packages, sure. I’m not sure I would agree with APIs.
ActiveAdmin is best in class, Rails is fantastic; but there’s a lot of insanity in the API for a language that “gets out of the way” and “just works”
Slice is my favorite example. (It’s been a bit since I’ve used it)
[0].slice(0, 100) == [0]
[].slice(0, 100) == … For a “give me an array back that starts from a given, arbitrary index, and auto-handle truncation” not having that behavior continues to confuse me from an intuitive perspective. Yes, I understand the source of it, but why?
Replies
weaksauce • today at 2:46 AM
because it's meant to be a more functional language. if slicing an array out of bounds threw an error it would be java.
[].slice(0, 100).each do |x| puts x end
that shouldn't be an error and it seems to be the principle of least surprise imo.
Because [] is an array with nothing in it, and [0] is an array with something in it.
So saying “give me the array containing the first 100 elements of this array with one element” would obviously give you the array with one element back.
Saying “give me the array containing the first 100 elements of this array with zero elements” would follow that it just gives the empty array back.
On top of that, because ruby is historically duck-typed, having something always return an array or an error makes sense, why return nil when there’s a logical explanation for defined behavior? Ditto for throwing an error.
Seems thoughtfully intuitive to me.