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0 pointsjb36897y ago0 comments

I disagree with this slightly. I've been using Ruby for a long, long time and Ruby does give you the tools to refactor safely - few people actually know how to use them though and there aren't very many high-level tools aimed at doing safe large-scale refactoring. In Ruby you can trace calls and do very powerful introspection which you can verify to make sure things like delegation happened properly

It also doesn't help when most codebases are using ActiveRecord or something in every complex class and wind up increasing the interface width and ancestor depth of their code significantly. The point is - I think the language does a pretty good job supporting the developers, but there are a lot of bad practices that are still in use and recommended. Can't fault the language because people are writing shit code

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sorbits7y ago

What tools are you talking about?

The “problem” with ruby is that you basically don’t know if code is valid unless you execute it, whereas a statically typed language will enforce a lot of things during compilation and simply not allow the program to compile, if API is used in the wrong way, this could be calling private functions, referencing undefined symbols (simple typos), wrong number of arguments, passing a string where integer is expected, etc.

Additionally access control is limited in Ruby, which makes it difficult to release a library and have the language enforce that people do not rely on things which are implementation details subject to change.

jb3689OP7y ago

You're right - all of those things are possible. What I'm arguing is that given you have a reasonably good test suite and are aware of what patterns to are dangerous, you can refactor fairly confidently with the tools given

For example, it's possible to fetch a class's entire interface before and after a refactor and validate it is the same. It's possible to dynamically wrap every method you're refactoring track them and type check them. And if you extend that idea, now you can output this data to files and perform static analysis. Sure, it all relies on you having some safe execution context to get this information but Ruby probably has the best testing tools of any language and many projects have great test coverage

For library owners, I agree with you - there's no hope. But for application developers maintaining their monoliths with nothing depending on them there's a lot you can do to ensure safe refactoring

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