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Thanks to Stack Overflow’s annual survey, we now have this gem (pun intended) of data:

Is this as absurd as it appears? Let’s take a closer look.

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git hooks, Ctags & Rails

Small adjustment to Tim Pope’s outstanding Effortless Ctags with Git:

To get ctags to also index all bundled gems (including Rails), make the following change to the ctags hook

Replace

git ls-files | \
  ctags --tag-relative -L - -f"$dir/$$.tags" --languages=-javascript,sql

with

ctags --recurse --tag-relative -f"$dir/$$.tags" --languages=-javascript,sql `bundle show --paths` `git ls-files`

After triggering the hook, the tags file takes a few seconds to generate in the background - have patience :)

_

That nondescript title is not a placeholder - this post is really about the underscore. It arose out of one of those rewarding moments where you suddenly feel that there must be a way to do something better, and a search quickly reveals that, indeed, there is.

Ever evaluate a complex - particularly multi-line - expression in irb or Rails console and immediately after hitting the Return key realize that you’ve neglected to assign the return value to a variable? Suffer no more:

2.2.0 :001 > [[1,2], [3,4]].map do |pair|
2.2.0 :002 >   pair[0]*2 + pair[1]*3
2.2.0 :003 > end
=> [8, 18]
2.2.0 :004 > _
=> [8, 18]
2.2.0 :005 > _.map { |c| c*2 }
=> [16, 36]

See that little line on lines 4 & 5?! Saved by the humble underscore.

Hash[ ]

Calling the [] method on Hash converts a one-dimensional array with an even number of elements into a hash, with odd/even elements alternating as keys/values. Very cool

2.2.0 :001 > Hash['key1', 'value1', 'key2', 5]
 => {"key1"=>"value1", "key2"=>5}
2.2.0 :002 > Hash['k1', 'v1', 'k2']
 => ArgumentError: odd number of arguments for Hash

On Cucumber and testing

This article was originally written as part of an ongoing discussion within the team building the OSRA app.

1. Cucumber.

Any time a component is added to an application, its anticipated benefits must be weighed against the costs of its implementation. Cucumber is a costly framework in terms of development time, developer effort, and cognitive strain on both creators and readers of tests due to the following:

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