Warning: I can’t think up something practical about what I prefer and explain below! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Last week I found myself writing a method ending with a question mark, but it wasn’t returning a Boolean. Just as most of the other methods ending with a question mark I wrote the last couple of years it returns either a NilClass instance, which evaluates to false, or some other object instance, which evaluates to true.
The question I want to answer is if such a method should return true or false or is returning nil or some object good enough?
Personally I think it should return a boolean value. I have more arguments opposed to returning a bool than not, but it just feels right, seems more logical. But! if there are humongous performance implications, I’m also happy enough with the way I did it before.
To check just this I wrote a simple class and some benchmarking code to see how big the implications are. I have two methods which mimics the normal situation and a method which returns a boolean value. I’m using the ‘!!’ trick to accomplish the typecasting. [you can see all the code in my ruby study git repos]
The test results show, I’m running the code 1 million times, that the difference is marginal. So for me the only logical conclusion is that returning a boolean, which feels more logical to me, is perfectly acceptable and will be my weapon of choice starting as of right now. If you have a practical use to actually justify this, please let me know!
Metraprogramming Ruby
On the everlasting mission of becoming a better developer, I’ve read ‘Metaprogramming Ruby‘ by Paolo Perrotta. The book gave me some great insights and inspired me create some more cheat sheets for my big secret cheat sheet project. For now I’ve created two and will post the first later this week.
For those interested in the contents of the book. If you are looking for a better (read total) understanding of the Ruby object model, interested in Eigenclasses and all sorts of advanced programming techniques, grab a copy! I think it is a great read!