While lurking on the #ruby-lang channel on freenode.net,
oddmund suggested creating a method_missing
handler that would “auto-correct” misspelled method. His suggestion was of
course a joke, but it was a pretty good one, so
he implemented it. I provided
my own implementation, along with some other
terrible ideas.
I will never push terrible_things to RubyGems for two reasons:
- It is a joke, obviously.
- Its features are incompletely implemented.
The goal of implementing this gem was to have a bit of fun and maybe explore
something potentially useful along the way. One useful bit came from
Ryan Davis, Gem::Text includes a Levenshtein
distance calculator, so that’s handy. The “semi-monadic” treatment of
NilClass actually wasn’t all that interesting. The idea has been done
a lot, and simply returning itself for method_missing doesn’t make it
a real “Maybe monad.” The fun and interesting part has been the lazy
evaluation bits. By overloading Object::new, all object instantiation can
be evaluated lazily. With a bit of enumerator handling, we can work with
infinite lists in Ruby by virtue of lazy evaluation.
Others have done similar things with Ruby, but most of them tend to only defer evaluation once, if further methods are invoked on the lazy “proxy”, then its fulfilled to a real object. To be fair, a useful lazy evaluation library really can’t be both correct and indefinitely lazy in Ruby — special care has to be taken when dealing with methods that mutate their object versus ones that return new objects.
Regardless, the whole exercise has been quite a bit of fun, and being able
to transform, filter, and take from infinite lists is pretty sweet. I can
definitely think of a cleaner implementation than the one derived from lazy
evaluation, though it ultimately relies on the same trick of using
Enumerator#next so that finite numbers of elements can be plucked from
these lists that would be impossible to directly compute.
This post is a bit light, both in length and in technical content, my apologies. I would like to say that so far I’m impressed with so-called “e-cigarettes.” They still provide nicotine, so I doubt they’ll be much help in breaking my addiction, but at least I’m not getting my fix by breathing deeply of burning organic matter. Now if only I could get nicotine in an easily digested gel tablet.