Here’s a real excerpt (slightly modified to protect the stupid, and now fixed) from a web app I inherited. GRAAAAAAAARGH!
def encrypt_password ... self.salt = md5("#{Time.now.to_s}-#{login}") ... end def generate_confirm_hash ... self.confirm_hash = md5("#{Time.now.to_s}-#{email}") .. end
Pro-tip for hiring managers: ask candidates to identify problems in the above code, and smack any who fail to do so.
Ruby is a wonderful language, largely deserving of the fanaticism surrounding it. There are a number of ways you can exploit its syntax to write concise, beautiful code. For example, to shuffle an array…
deck.sort_by{ rand }
…or to pick out certain elements of one…
deck.find_all{ |card| card.suit == Clubs }
…or to seamlessly cache computations.
def average_earnings @average_earnings ||= some_lengthy_computation end
(Above, the ||= operator acts analogously to the familiar += operator. So if the instance variable @average_earnings already has a non-nil value, it is returned without any further computation. If on the other hand it is nil, then some_lengthy_computation is performed, @average_earnings is set to it, and returned.)
In addition, there are also a number of ridiculously short applications written in it, including a web server in 70 lines of code, a message board application in 500 lines, and its slightly more verbose successor.
In addition to these, I present a proof of concept of my own: Mathematica and Maple-like symbolic differentiation in about a hundred lines of code.