Rails – The Missing Parts

interactor: https://github.com/collectiveidea/interactor wisper: https://github.com/krisleech/wisper

The thing which Rails and DHH offer no guidance whatsoever is the separation of persistence from the domain model. The Active Record pattern is itself a conflation of those two things, so this is an opinionated choice, and I respect it as a sane default for a wide variety of applications. It works perfectly fine up to a certain scale but when the business logic reaches a certain complexity and the persistence logic reaches a certain complexity then it makes sense to separate them. A lot of proposed solutions might be overkill, but keep in mind that DHH and the company formerly known as 37signals specialize in minimalist software, so they combat this complexity from the UX down rather than conceiving architectures to support it. I agree with this philosophy insomuch as all else being equal, simpler is better, but the problem is that some applications are necessarily more complex than Basecamp, and sometimes we need more than what Rails provides out of the box. Convincing DHH of this is pointless because he doesn't have to deal with it and he has no incentive to understand anyone else's pain in this regard.

This method in mime-types is reported by Code Climate as a code smell. They're wrong: it's the smallest it can possibly be while still correctly performing the necessary goal; any smaller, and you have to break it into multiple smaller methods that provide no value except keeping Code Climate happy. https://github.com/halostatue/mime-types/blob/master/lib/mim... The method is ~35 lines long. There are other cases I can provide from open source work (https://github.com/halostatue/mime-types/blob/master/lib/mim... is a good example: deprecated code, parser for a file type where splitting into multiple methods only complicates the logic flow).

It is true that the larger a method gets the less readable, understandable, and clear it gets—but that should never translate into the sort of nonsensical request you made, asking about maximum LOC. Asking that paints you as a prescriptivist who doesn't bother understanding the context the code requires.

I've been writing software for a long time, and while I try to write methods as short, clear, composable “paragraphs”, I sometimes will write something much longer than is readable because I can't figure out a meaningful way to break it down. That comes over time and reading and interaction with the code.

The best developers in my experience are pragmatic. They are aware of design patterns, but don't treat them like sewing patterns. They are aware of development practices, but don't treat them like holy writ. The GoF design patterns book is an excellent descriptivist treatise, but then people started treating it like a cookbook and looked for reasons to implement Patterns everywhere, rather than extracting the patterns from their code.

Blog posts like this one (that tell me that I should use an Interactor) pattern are actively dangerous, because they provide dicta without properly explaining the pain that the pattern evolved to solve, or the proper evolution of the pattern.

The current code base I work on shows a lot of evidence of Rails Fads just like this one, and I'm trying to get my team to step back and ask why we do things certain ways and to go back to first principles. Don't just reach for a Presenter because it's what was done before. Don't even reach for an ActiveModel::Serializer because it's what we're preferring now for API representations. Figure out your problem. State it clearly. Write the solution clearly. Find code that works similarly and figure out (a) if and (b) how they can be extracted into common code.

There is a cost to adopting things like Presenters and making smaller methods: your interface becomes larger. You can complain all you like of large files and functions, but code bases that have large numbers of classes whose purpose aren't clear…are harder to navigate and understand. (I have, in the current code base, unextracted code from external classes when that external class is used in one place and it makes the behaviour more understandable. It also provides a better place to understand where similar behaviour may appear later so that we can properly extract code if and when it is necessary later.)