Ruby Best Practices

Chapter 5. Functional Programming Techniques

It doesn’t take much time to realize that Ruby is a deeply object-oriented language that openly steals from the best of Smalltalk. But Matz is an equal-opportunity thief, and he has snatched features from various other languages as well, including Lisp. This means that although Ruby has its roots in object-oriented principles, we also have some of the high-level constructs that facilitate functional programming techniques.

Rightfully speaking, Ruby is not a functional programming language. Though it is possible to come close with great effort, Ruby simply lacks a number of the key aspects of functional languages. Virtually all state in Ruby is mutable, and because it is an object-oriented language, we tend to focus on state management rather than elimination of state. Ruby lacks tail call optimization,^[9] making recursion highly inefficient. Beyond these key things, there are plenty of other subtleties that purists can discuss at length if you let them.

However, if you let Ruby be Ruby, you can benefit from certain functional techniques while still writing object-oriented code. This chapter will walk you through several practices that are inspired by functional languages and that have practical value for solving problems in Ruby. We’ll look at things like lazy evaluation, memoization, infinite lists, higher-order procedures, and other stuff that has a nice academic ring to it. Along the way, I’ll do my best to show you that this stuff isn’t ...