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I've not written Ruby since about 2006 except with a stint in a Rails codebase which did nothing to give me any faith. How do you go about e.g. extracting a gro

I've not written Ruby since about 2006 except with a stint in a Rails codebase which did nothing to give me any faith. How do you go about e.g. extracting a group of fields and renaming them? Or reorder function arguments? Is there a static tool that can do this, or do you have to do some kind of text search and hope you got them all?

dymk 5y ago
There's basically no tool for doing that, aside from relying on tests to tell you a callsite is now incorrect. "find and replace" is... okay, up to a point, but obviously that has its limitations (especially once you start metaprogramming). That being said, I still love Ruby. I have all sorts of little tools written in it that would have been a pain to do in another language.
- afandian 5y ago
  Coming from a Clojure background which is … different. But I understand the enthusiasm around similar language features. But to borrow words from another comment I find Kotlin “ruthlessly productive”. Apart from the lambdas, functions, data classes and immutably, it’s the ability to quickly and correctly refactor that makes me feel like I can work at speed and try stuff out.
  - dymk 5y ago
    I wish I could find Kotlin as ruthlessly productive as Ruby, but... I'm having a hard time doing so. It's got nothing to do with the language itself - at work, I really enjoy Kotlin. Here's where Ruby shines for me: when I'm whipping up a script, I can toss a `Bundler.setup(:default)` at the top of the script, `vim mything.rb`, `$> ruby mything.rb` (or `./mything.rb` if I hashbang at the top), and I'm off to the races. With Kotlin, it feels like I need to set up a project in IntelliJ, `$> ./gradlew run`, wait 10 seconds for the whole thing to compile, and finally my thing is running. Is there a streamlined way to run a Kotlin script without building a whole jar, from the command line? I know this is generally not as easy with compiled languages. The D programming language is a notable example that has a "D script" mode (hashbang with `rdmd`), which quickly compiles+runs in a single step.
    - lbhdc 5y ago
      kotlin has support for being run like a standalone script. I believe the convention is giving them the `.kts` extension. Here is an example with a shebang https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-script-examples/blob/master/jvm/main-kts/scripts/kotlinx-html.main.kts https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-script-examples/blob/master...
      - dymk 5y ago
        Thank you! The syntax for specifying dependencies was the bit of the missing puzzle piece for me.
Gigachad 5y ago
The ruby way is you just don’t do that. Or you use named arguments which are unordered. In most ruby code I have worked with, most non trivial methods use named arguments.
sparker72678 5y ago
There are IDEs with this kind of functionality. RubyMine has a fairly robust refactoring tool, for example.

dymk 5y ago

There's basically no tool for doing that, aside from relying on tests to tell you a callsite is now incorrect. "find and replace" is... okay, up to a point, but obviously that has its limitations (especially once you start metaprogramming). That being said, I still love Ruby. I have all sorts of little tools written in it that would have been a pain to do in another language.

afandian 5y ago
Coming from a Clojure background which is … different. But I understand the enthusiasm around similar language features. But to borrow words from another comment I find Kotlin “ruthlessly productive”. Apart from the lambdas, functions, data classes and immutably, it’s the ability to quickly and correctly refactor that makes me feel like I can work at speed and try stuff out.
- dymk 5y ago
  I wish I could find Kotlin as ruthlessly productive as Ruby, but... I'm having a hard time doing so. It's got nothing to do with the language itself - at work, I really enjoy Kotlin. Here's where Ruby shines for me: when I'm whipping up a script, I can toss a `Bundler.setup(:default)` at the top of the script, `vim mything.rb`, `$> ruby mything.rb` (or `./mything.rb` if I hashbang at the top), and I'm off to the races. With Kotlin, it feels like I need to set up a project in IntelliJ, `$> ./gradlew run`, wait 10 seconds for the whole thing to compile, and finally my thing is running. Is there a streamlined way to run a Kotlin script without building a whole jar, from the command line? I know this is generally not as easy with compiled languages. The D programming language is a notable example that has a "D script" mode (hashbang with `rdmd`), which quickly compiles+runs in a single step.
  - lbhdc 5y ago
    kotlin has support for being run like a standalone script. I believe the convention is giving them the `.kts` extension. Here is an example with a shebang https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-script-examples/blob/master/jvm/main-kts/scripts/kotlinx-html.main.kts https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-script-examples/blob/master...
    - dymk 5y ago
      Thank you! The syntax for specifying dependencies was the bit of the missing puzzle piece for me.

Gigachad 5y ago

The ruby way is you just don’t do that. Or you use named arguments which are unordered. In most ruby code I have worked with, most non trivial methods use named arguments.

sparker72678 5y ago

There are IDEs with this kind of functionality. RubyMine has a fairly robust refactoring tool, for example.