Ruby Best Practices

Conclusions

Although we covered a number of “functional programming techniques” throughout this chapter, it’s fairly plain to see that Ruby isn’t a functional programming language. Even if we can force Ruby into being pretty much whatever we want it to be, it’s generally not an advisable thing to do.

Nevertheless, we’ve covered some interesting and useful tricks here that were inspired by techniques used in other languages. By letting Ruby be Ruby and not striving too hard for a direct translation, we end up with code that is actually practical and suitable for use in everyday applications.

My general feeling about applying functional programming techniques in Ruby is mainly that they can be a true source of elegance and simplicity when appropriate. However, judging when it’s the right time to bust out some functional goodness rather than going with the more vanilla approach can be difficult, even among seasoned developers. It is entirely possible to make your code too clever, and this often has real penalties in performance or in the ability of other developers to easily learn your code.

Many functional programming techniques result in code that is highly readable at the expense of learnability, at least in the context of Ruby. If you keep an eye on that balance and make it fit within your working environment, you’ll be just fine.

Even if some of the techniques seen in this chapter cannot be readily used in a direct way in many cases, there is a lot to be said for thinking differently ...