Talking to yourself is bad mmkay?

A lot of languages encourage talking to yourself. Lots of OO PHP code is sprinkled with code that looks like $this->foo_method();. In some languages it's necessary. Ruby isn't one of them.

class Foo
  def bar
    # Why are you talking to yourself?!
    @thingy = self.foo
  end

  def foo
    "QUUX!"
  end
end

The code above could be written without self at all.

class Foo
  def bar
    @thingy = foo
  end

  def foo
    "QUUX!"
  end
end

While this is a (very) trivial example, it makes a huge difference on larger code-bases. Give it a try: if you don't talk to yourself your code will look less crazy.

Only one caveat: when you're doing assignment you'll need to talk to yourself unless you're doing a local assignment.

class Foo
  attr_accessor :thingy

  def bar
    # This will assign to a local variable.
    thingy = foo
  end

  def foo
    "QUUX!"
  end
end

class Foo
  attr_accessor :thingy

  def bar
    # This will call Foo#thingy=
    self.thingy = foo
  end

  def foo
    "QUUX!"
  end
end

written by

Craig

published

2008-10-20