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And welcome to 'Who Wants to be a Ruby Engineer?' This is a Ruby game show, and I am your host. Look, that's me! Sorry.
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My name is Drew Bragg. Contrary to popular belief, I am from a city called Philadelphia, not a state called Oklahoma. I am a Staff Engineer at a lovely company called Within3. I also host a podcast called 'Code and The Code Encoders.' If you can't tell, I'm not great at coming up with good names.
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I also co-organize the monthly Meetup for Philly RB, which is a Philadelphia Ruby Meetup. You do not have to be from Philadelphia to join us, as it's all virtual now. Just come and hang out with other cool Rubyists. I can be found on the internet most places as Dr. Bragg.
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Now that the not-so-fun stuff is out of the way, I want to say first that most of the Ruby syntax you're about to see is valid Ruby. It'll run, but I don't recommend putting it in production. You can use it to confuse your co-workers or play practical jokes on them—it's a lot of fun! You can also use it to gain a better understanding of how Ruby works. Just remember, don’t put it in production; it's not a good idea.
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I love that Ruby is a weird language. I love that we can be expressive with it. I think it's great to keep Ruby weird. I like fun Ruby; it's so whimsical, and there are so many cool things we can do with it. However, we are professionals, and we owe a debt to our future selves and our co-workers to keep Ruby readable.
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I'm going to try and drive home that point today in a fun way. We're going to play a game called 'Who Wants to be a Ruby Engineer?' I have some lovely contestants here up in the front row, and they're going to get up one at a time to guess the output of a small snippet of Ruby.
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I am not a monster; it will be multiple choice. They'll have A, B, C, or D to choose from. If they're still stuck, they have two powers they can use: they can pair program, which means they can select someone from the audience to give them a hand, or they can search Stack Overflow. Spoiler alert: you're all Stack Overflow; we'll take a poll and go with whatever gets the most votes.
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If a contestant gets a question wrong, they will sit down. Contestants probably will get them wrong, as I went out of my way to make these kind of hard. We should applaud them when they get a question wrong because that is not a failure of knowledge; that is a success in learning. This is weird Ruby for a reason.
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But it is a game show, so I do have some awesome prizes thanks to some wonderful people. Brittany Martin from the Ruby on Rails podcast donated a bunch of cool stuff. If you don't listen to the podcast, you absolutely should get on that. The one and only Andrew Mason contributed some money and let me go on a spending spree. You probably know him from Remote Ruby or Ruby for All or the Ruby Road Radar newsletter, because he does all the things.
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The one and only Andy Kroll donated some wise and poignant guides to Ruby, which is an awesome book.
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So, are you guys ready? I'm ready; I think I'm ready. I don't know; we'll find out. Alright, so let's get our first contestant. Come on down! Anyone who wants to volunteer to go first?
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My name is Rock Davenport. I'm from Charlotte, North Carolina, by way of Brooklyn, New York. Yeah, here we go! And I've been working with Ruby for two years.
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Excellent! Alright, are you ready to play? No? Okay, well, we're going to do it anyway.
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I will give you the first question. It's going to be a warm-up question so you know how this works and so that everybody else can get a feel for how this is going to go. If you get it right, great! Bonus points for you. If you get it wrong, you still stay up, and we'll do a real question. Sound good? Fair enough? Excellent!
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So your first question is, if you take a look up at the screen, let me get to the question. Alright, so for folks in the back, this is the size of my Ruby syntax; you may want to move up or over here, as it's a little easier to see.
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So, we're going to have one with two colons, a plus sign, some parentheses with a two inside. What are we going to get? Is it going to be A) 3, B) a NoMethodError, C) 12, or D) a syntax error?
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A? Excellent! Nice work. First question down!
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Now, for those of you who are thinking, 'Wait, what? How did that give us 3?' You’re probably familiar with the double colon as a namespace resolution operator. It's how we move through constants and do constant lookups and things of that nature. But it can also be used to call instance methods.
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Since 1 is an instance of an integer, we can just call plus on it and give it an argument of 2. The double colon plus is equivalent to sending the symbol plus or, more commonly, 1 plus 2. Yeah, for the love of math, please use 1 plus 2! Don't do this.
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Don't just don't do that. And definitely don't put it in production. Alright, are you ready for a real question?
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You’re great! Alright, so here we go. Take a look up at the screen. We have: 1.a.a 5.a 2.a. There’s an underscore in there. You ready for your answers? Yes? Got it!
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A) a Range, B) a NoMethodError, C) nil, or D) an array with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
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Now remember, you have the powers. You can pair; you can search Stack Overflow.
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Stack Overflow? Alright, what do we think crowd? Are we going to go with A) a Range? Hands up.
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A couple of people. B) a NoMethodError—okay, more people. C) nil—yeah, a handful. Or D) the array. Whoa, that's a lot of people who don't know what they're doing. Wow!
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What do you think?
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I mean, most people said D. I'm going to go with B.
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Smart man, smart man. Sometimes Stack Overflow is wrong.
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So for those who voted for D and are confused, you need to wrap ranges in parentheses in order to call methods on them because of how operator precedence works. What we just saw was equivalent to: 1..5 to A.
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And integers don’t have a 2.A method on them, so don’t forget your parentheses. Nice work! I got lucky; that's a good one!
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Alright, let's try something a little different. We have a global variable called hello. We're going to set it to the string 'world.' Then we are going to use hello with a pound sign and a dollar sign and 'hello.' So what are we going to get here?
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Are we going to get A) a syntax error, B) the string 'hello world,' C) the literal string up there 'hello pound dollar sign hello,' or D) a name error?
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C? You still have one more power; I know.
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Unfortunately, no! I discovered this very fun thing with a typo and was very confused as to how things were still working. So it turns out when you're interpolating instance variables—the ones with the @—class variables, the two @’s, or global variables—you don’t need the curly braces.
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You can just use the pound sign. So round of applause for Rock! Thank you for playing!
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Alright, I'm going to need my next contestant. Come on down!
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My name is Dominic Rodriguez. I am from San Diego, Dominican Republic, and I've been working with Ruby for two years.
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Great! Alright, you ready to play? No? Oh well; neither was Rock, and he did very well! So let's see how you do with this guy.
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We have a method called stringify. I think that's stringify—yes, it is! And it takes an argument called hash. Then we're doing it. If we have hash, we'll do hash.to_s. So when we call stringify and pass it curly braces, what do we get?
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Do we get A) the string of an empty hash (just two curly braces), B) nil, C) an argument error, or D) a NoMethodError?
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And remember, you do have your power-ups, so you can ask Stack Overflow, although they've proven to be not great. You should have gone with ChatGPT!
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Or you can pick someone out of the crowd to help you out. So what do you think? I think A.
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Are you sure you want to use power-ups? No? Sure!
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No, it's an ArgumentError, unfortunately. So for those who thought it was A, thank you.
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You probably know that we can omit parentheses when we're calling methods and passing some variables; however, you have to be careful because when dealing with hashes like this, Ruby's going to interpret it as a block.
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So to ensure that the method is passed as a hash, you need the parentheses. A little bit of a theme there, I think.
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Alright, that means I need my next contestant. Come on down!
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Alright, same deal. I'm Christine. I'm from Queens, New York, and I've been working with Ruby for about eight years, but I don't think that's going to help me here.
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Um, yeah, well, let’s find out. Here’s your first question: oh, syntax highlighting! Why do you never work for me? We have a variable Foo, and it's set to the string 'bar' because I, again, don't do well with naming.
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We have some regex stuff in an equal with the tilde and the string 'bar' again. So what’s Foo? Is it the string 'bar,' a NameError, the string 'b,' or a syntax error?
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And you do have your power-ups! Should have downloaded the Jeopardy theme.
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Yeah, what's print? What's print, Foo? Yeah, okay.
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Um... pairing a random guess? I’m close to just giving a random guess.
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Yes? What do you think? You think it's C? Okay, because that’s what I was thinking based on the /w but capture. Yeah, okay.
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Alright, let’s see. Nice work!
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Alright, so when we are doing regular expressions with Ruby, by using named captures and our equals sign with the tilde, we're going to create local variables for those named groups.
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If we already have variables with those names, we're going to override them. We need to be careful; I've gotten bitten by this.
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Alright, are you ready for your next one? Here’s an easy one for you! Move the range 1 through 5, and we're going to iterate over it. Next, if I double equals 2... dot dot I equals 4; otherwise, print I. So, are we going to get 2, 3, and 4, 3, 1, and 5, or a syntax error for using too many dots?
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You can’t pair, but you can use Stack Overflow. Okay, so if on the cases where in the range, next if there’s a range true or false to...
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Well, you’re never going to have both universe; I is ever going to be able to equal. Thinking the word false or false or true and false but never true and true.
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And then it’s put, saying right, so that can only happen. This is great; I like hearing you think out loud. This is awesome! Most people just stand up here silently going, 'What is wrong with you?'
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My brain! Same! Which is why this is in here.
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Why Stack Overflow?
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Alright, Stack Overflow; what do we think? A) 2, 3, 4? Anybody? Bueller?
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A couple of people. B) just 3? Nobody.
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C) 1 and 5? A couple people. Or D) a syntax error?
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C or D? Yes, yes, flip a coin! Um, I guess the copy-paste I’ll be doing from Stack Overflow is C: 1 and 5.
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So for those of you who want to Google this, this is called a flip-flop operator, and it hurts my head! Basically, how a flip-flop operator works is when you have a conditional inside of a loop, it will evaluate to true when the first thing evaluates to true and until the last thing evaluates to true.
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So we're just going to skip 2, 3, and 4, which is why we get 1 and 5. Fun fact: this was deprecated for a while, and then they opted to keep it. You’re doing good! Are you ready for another one?
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The syntax highlighting does not cooperate. Alright, sorry again about syntax highlighting because it works and then it doesn't.
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So we have a class Boop because I’m getting better with naming, and we're going to define an instance method of bang (or exclamation, whatever you call it) and that’s going to return 'beep'.
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Because naming! So, not boop.new.
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A) false, B) true, C) beep, D) no method error?
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No power-ups, though; yeah, you’re all out. No, it's all alone!
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Andy, I should give you a mic and have you do the music. No one wants to hear me sing! Um... I will go with A) false.
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Actually, it’s going to return B) beep. Yes!
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The people who were like 'Wait, what?' You’re right. This is interesting. So when you call the not keyword, what it actually does is it calls the bang method on the thing you’re calling it on.
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In this case, we overrode it, so we get 'beep.' Alright, so that means I need another contestant! Thomas!
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Yeah, my name is Thomas; I'm from Copenhagen by way of Queens. I've never written Ruby before, so I probably won’t get these, and that’s the reason why.
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Well, that’s fun! So let me introduce you to my friend called Ruby. That’s a really nice programming language.
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No, seriously, yeah. No, I've been writing... This is a bad example of intuitive Ruby; this is not how you should ingest Ruby the first time.
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How long have you actually been doing Ruby? Oh, since 2017. Okay, so math is hard. That's why we have Joelle!
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Alright, let’s take a look! We have a... oh, you know, I like your voice better than mine! You do this.
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I really join the club! Alright, 1, 2, and 3 in an array. We map over it, and then just send it some symbols; yeah, just a couple of them, like a keyboard mash.
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So what’s the array? Is it 1, 2, and 3? No method error? Syntax error? 6?
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Which math is hard, but 6 is if you added them all up, yeah, yeah. Cool! Now you do have your power-ups; you can pair and use Stack Overflow.
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Yeah, um, so before I use one of those two, because I definitely am going to, we have this array—we called map!—and then we're sending it Plus at.
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Uh, as a symbol, and then we’re printing. Okay, now you got it! I would think B or C because I don’t understand this, so my brain is having a syntax error.
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I wouldn’t know; I would never do that to you, probably! But yeah, I think this is probably... it probably works somehow.
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But I have no idea what, uh, so I would like to pair through all.
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Alright, who thinks they can help Thomas out? Of course you do, Brandon! Brandon, what do you think?
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You just ruined so much of my show! I know it would have been better with negatives, but that was in the last show, so now we’re doing...
