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Sandi Metz: Nothing is Something - at BathRuby

13 Mar, 2015
1 minute read

I’m at Bath Ruby 2015, live blogging some of the talks

  • All of her teaching ideas have a single underlying principle
  • Learned OO from Smalltalk - massive influence on the way she thinks about objects
  • + is just a method on Fixnum
  • Ruby’s if is effectively a typecheck (a check of whether an object is a member of NilClass/Trueclass ??)
    • if is very prodedural (not OO)
  • Sometimes nil means nothing - so just remove nils from your results (e.g. compact the array
  • try can effectively be a typecheck (for NilClass)
  • Conditions breed: if you have one you’ll get more. Making a change around them in one place may involve making changes in lots of places (“shotgun surgery”)
  • If you return nil then calls to that object can return objects which respond to different Apis: The object’s or NilClass’s. Solution: Null Object Pattern (#ftw)
  • Null Object is for when Nothing is actually a thing - for when you need to talk to it
  • Null Object is a new dependency, so wrap it in a new class which returns either an instance of your Object, or the Null Object, then pass this new class around
  • Null Object is a concrete implementation of a more general idea
  • Single responsibilities allow you to override specific behaviours when inheriting
  • Extending behaviour by inheritance makes it impossible to share multiple behaviours
  • Inheritance is for specialisation (not for ??)
    • There’s no such thing as just one specialisation…
  • Approach - Composition and dependecy injection:
    1. make the original behaviour and the new behaviour look the same - this highlights the way they’re different
    2. Give the new behaviour a name - this helps work out what’s being applied to the original object
    3. Inject an object which represents the behaviour