Hugo Bonacci has been tweeting a lot about the Eloquent Ruby book, so I decided to pick up a copy. In spite in my year or two of working with Ruby, I still feel like a n00b most of the time because I’m still stuck with a C# mentality most of the time. So, I decided to give this book a whirl and hope that I can finally cross the chasm of ruby idioms.

My Misunderstanding Of ! Methods

Early in the book, Russ talks about some basic method naming conventions and idioms, including methods with a ! at the end of them. After reading what he has to say, I’ve realized that my understanding of these methods was slightly off.

I used to think that a method with a ! on it, for example `Array#map!`, meant that the method would modify the object that the method was called on. In the case of the map! method this is true. There’s a non-! version of the method that returns a new array with the changes made in it, but the ! version of map! does modify the array directly.

However, my understanding of the ! convention was not complete and it often left me questioning the use of the symbol in other methods on other objects. Things just didn’t quite match up to my understanding. For example, in Rails and ActiveModel, `save!` doesn’t necessarily change anything in the in-memory object. It saves changes to the underlying data store and throws exceptions if any validation or other errors have occurred. The non-! version does the same work, but instead of throwing exceptions, it stores messages in the .errors collection. This was very puzzling to me. Why would they use a ! method name for something that doesn’t always change the object?

Adjusting My Understanding

Page 13 of the Eloquent Ruby book explains the ! convention in a manner that encapsulates my previous understanding and at the same time, expands what the convention covers so that methods like save! no longer seem odd to me. Here’s what Russ has to say:

Ruby programmers reserve ! to adorn the names of methods that do something unexpected, or perhaps a bit dangerous.

Aha! That explains not only my understanding of the map! method but also the save! method.

In the case of map vs map!, the ! version is dangerous and/or has unexpected behavior and the non-! version is “safe”. The non-! version doesn’t modify anything in the original array. It creates a new array and returns it (this is a very common idiom in itself; do get data from parameters and return a new object with a modified version of the input). The ! version is dangerous because is overwrites the original array’s contents. This may also be considered “unexpected” behavior because it’s not the normal return-a-modified-copy behavior.

In the case of save vs save!, the ! version is unexpected behavior and/or dangerous because it will raise exceptions when validation fails. The non-! version, by contrast, won’t. It will only populate the .errors collection. Calling save! is potentially dangerous because it can crash an app due to throwing exceptions.

Off To A Great Start