Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Thor finds Mjolnir

If you've been following the development of Thor, you'll know there's been a bug that affected commands with several layers of namespacing. Tonight I'm happy to announce this bug was finally crushed by Yehuda Katz.

Just to briefly describe the pain this has brought me, a few facts:

* Class.constants only gets the top level constants. If you have Foo::Bar::Baz, don't expect to see Baz in Foo.constants

* Struct is mean:



(You can imagine how the first point led me to the second, right? Yeah...fun.

* Remember, when you ask for constants on a class, it:

Returns an array of the names of the constants accessible in mod. This includes the names of constants in any included modules (example at start of section).

It _also_ returns constants defined in any class you inherit from.

So, lets just say this all added up to a nice bit of hacking for me, and truthfully it was a good experience. It started to get old after a while, but I think this is something people don't talk about enough. Its the same with lifting weights: you purposely destroy and rip apart your muscles so they can build up bigger and stronger next time.

If you don't at least semi-often tackle hard problems, frustrating situations, and just fight through those moments when you think "screw it, PHP isn't that bad", you'll never get the kind of experience that really makes you grow as a Rubyist, and really, a programmer. You'll often find at the end not only did you learn some new tricks, but sometimes the solution is right there before your eyes....or Yehuda's eyes...but still, you'll get a lot out of it.

So anyway, I'm happy to point people to http://github.com/wycats/thor/tree/master and say 'Enjoy!' The soon to come Merb bundling tasks will be taking advantage of Thor's power, so if you haven't done anything with Thor yet, now's a great time to jump on board.

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