Refreshing my Ruby Skills
Last week I was in an interview where they wanted me to code in Ruby - nothing else. I wasn't really prepared to write Ruby, as it's been a good 18 months since I've written a line of it - maybe more. But I excused my poor memory of the syntax and dug in. But it got me thinking, and I decided to brush up on my Ruby skills, and have a little fun at the same time.
So I made a new directory, and started grinding the gears on my memory to get things back in line for working on Ruby. This means remembering rvm, and how to even find the version of Ruby for the .ruby-version file in the root of the project. Then there were the .rspec lines for getting nice looking test output - and running the tests in random order every time. And I still hadn't gotten to the code.
So I started working on the programming task I got in the interview, and it was really amazing to me that some of the hints I'd gotten in the interview were really not at all how I wrote it when I had the chance to do it on my own. For example, I needed to take a string, and get the first character, and then the rest - very much like clojure would do it. I was given the hint that "hello".chars would give me an Array of the characters, and on their box it did - but in Ruby 1.9.2, it returns an Enumerator, and that's an entirely different thing. Also, it requires that we allocate new storage.
What I really wanted was: "hello"[0,1] - that's a string of the first character in the string. And then the rest is just: "hello"[1,10], or another long number to get the rest. This is what was sitting in the back of my memory, and when I saw it, a lot of other little things started flooding back in.
Things started accelerating, and in no time I was looking at a far cleaner version of the test code I'd written just a few days ago. Far more idiomatic Ruby, and the tests were super simple to write, and took advantage of the contextual nature of the tests.
I'm not going to claim that I'm even a decent Ruby coder. I'm just fair. The class library is just far too expansive to know it all without dealing with it on a daily basis, and even then, on a large codebase that takes advantage of the different classes as well. It's vast. Which is nice, don't get me wrong, but it's why I know it'd take me a very long time to master even where things are - let alone their syntax and usage. But it's something I may have to do, so it's nice to get back in it.