More and more, I am wishing that there was some sort of strict mode I could enable in ruby to say “you know what? I’m careful with my code. Please don’t assume things behind my back”. And to be honest, this mode would pretty much be synonymous with “just do what python would do”

By default, python is strict. If you index a dict (hash) with a nonexistant key, you get a keyError. If you don’t want to have to deal with that, you can use the get method and provide a default for if the key doesn’t exist. In ruby, if you want to be strict about anything, you generally have to write your own checks to guard against the core library’s forgivingness. Forgivingness sounds nice at first, but goes completely against the idea of failing fast, and frequently delays the manifestation of bugs, making them that much harder to actually track down.

Two examples that I came across within minutes of each other the other day:

Struct.new(:a,:b,:c).new('a','b')

that should NOT go without an exception

"a|b||c".split("|")
=> ["a", "b", "", "c"]

good…. so now:

"a|b||".split("|")
=> ["a", "b"]

argh! what have you done to my third field?

There’s no | (pipe) sign in Morse code, thus making it difficult to port to Linux.

• b3ta

/groan

Hooray! Now we can control our electrical devices with all the user-friendliness of morse code!

I want my 20 minutes back. (Tetris HD)

On the same codebase, with no changes pending in either system:

$ time git status
# ...
real	0m0.618s

$ time bzr status
# ...
real	0m3.795s

It’s a small thing, but it matters.