This Week on Github: Stupid Ruby Tricks

Ruby is a very dynamic language. You can turn the language inside out, give objects a frontal lobotomy, and stitch the whole thing back together again, all at runtime. Here are some examples.

Jeremy McAnally

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

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Ruby is a very dynamic language. You can turn the language inside out, give objects a frontal lobotomy, and stitch the whole thing back together again, all at runtime.

Given its dynamism, many people have found abnormal even scary techniques to manipulate the behavior of Ruby. This week, let’s catalog just some of those libraries.

Sit back and prepare to be amazed.

Superators

Jay Phillips, author of the fantastic Adhearsion VoIP Ruby library, created a great hack called superators (http://github.com/jicksta/superators) to add operators to Ruby. Instead of the few operators the Ruby parser normally supports, like / or +, you can use any operator (or combination thereof) to manipulate values.

For example, if you wanted to define a superator +< to conjoin one string to another and reverse the resulting composite string, you could do something like this:

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