[LRUG] What makes a truly horrendous Ruby hack?

[Ben Gimpert]

Hi LRUG,

A bit late I realize -- but this beast I wrote (a while back) abuses how the
Ruby parser happens to handle symbols:

    http://files.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com/sss/sss

Who says : cannot *also* be the spreadsheet-style differentiator between
coordinates? Oh, and dig that ridiculous use of eval around
"FormulaContext.new.instance_eval(formula)" Horrendous enough?

Cheers,
Ben


On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Daniel Lucraft <dan at fluentradical.com>wrote:

>
> Thanks everyone, I've had a couple of really awful
> suggestions, which is great.
>
> I still need some more, so I'd like to give a little
> preview of my talk and explain more precisely what
> makes a truly 'horrendous' Ruby hack.
>
> A Horrendous Ruby Hack has some or all of the
> following properties:
>
>  (1) it monkeys with core classes
>  (2) it appears to change the syntax of the language
>  (2b) it *actually* changes the syntax of the language
>  (3) it redefines the behaviour of core classes
>  (4) it would be absolutely impossible to debug unless
> someone told you what it was doing
>  (5) you'd get fired if you used it on production code
>
> Also, let's focus on Ruby for now. Rails is too easy.
>
> Please keep them coming.
>
> best,
> Dan
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Ben Gimpert
mobile +44 (0)7985947039
ben at somethingmodern.com
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