Rails, Ruby, And Type-Checking

Rails, Ruby, And Type-Checking

I guess I was pontificating a little, but I want to go into more detail. Rails does something brilliant with its association classes like belongs_to and has_one ; it gives composition the same kind of emphasis and importance that inheritance already enjoys in every class-based object-oriented language (e.g., everything from C++ to Python). Rails lets you declare composition right at the top of the file, right after you declare inheritance: class Sub < Super has_one :association end This is part of ActiveRecord, but it's not intrinsic to databases. It's intrinsic to objects themselves. Imagine Rails never used a database. Would belongs_to and has_one still be useful? Of course they would. I really believe that languages should treat this as a core feature. If composition matters more than inheritance, but language features put a spotlight on inheritance while downplaying co...

Full article: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2013/01/rails-ruby-and-t...