Talk Notes: "Implicit to Explicit: Decoding Ruby's Magical Syntax" (RailsConf 2021)

#rails #techtalks

✨ What is this post about: As a part of my professional growth, I make time to watch conference talks on Ruby, Rails, JS, React, tech writing, and tech trivia. Previously, I'd just watch them but now I will take and publish notes for future reference. This talk was a part of RailsConf 2021 that I'm participating in at the time of writing.

✨ Talk: 'Implicit to Explicit: Decoding Ruby's Magical Syntax' by Justin Gordon

✨ One-paragraph summary: Ruby's implicitness makes it great for readability and DSLs. But that also gives Ruby a "magical" syntax compared to JavaScript. In this talk, let's convert the implicit to explicit in some familiar Rails code. What was "magic" will become simple, understandable code.

✨ Impression: I feel this talk was much more about pry and I am blown away by Justin's 🔥 ~/.pryrc 🔥 (see below ) and the ease it introduces into debugging 💕 I loved this talk, and Justin's way of calm and kind explaining complex concepts.

Notes

DSL: Domain-Specific Language
Rails leverages Ruby's implicitness:
- self
- variable declarations
- parentheses
- much more
Can we learn to read Ruby code like the Ruby interpreter?
- ideally, you should understand the code, not just copy-paste
🔥 🔥 🔥 OMG Justin's pry demo is a must-watch! I need to re-watch it and code along 🔥 🔥 🔥

JS vs Ruby

JS is very explicit:
- you need the parentheses for function invocations;
- this is rarely implicit;
- explicit return in standard functions;
Ruby is often implicit:
- parentheses are optional and so zero arg method calls are the same as object values (user.first can be a method invocation or just a call for the attribute);
- self can be implicit or explicit (it's explicit for writer methods because otherwise, Ruby's trying to declare a new local var)
- implicit returns;