Interesting

• A Pivot noted a facepalm + headdesk moment when debugging an issue whose cause turned out to be related to two adjacent string literals being auto-concatenated by Ruby’s parser.

  >> "foo" "bar"
  => "foobar"
  

In this case, a missing comma in a method call went undetected because of this language characteristic. Whether or not this follows the principle of least surprise is an exercise left up to the reader.

• Another pair warned that while this is valid syntax in Ruby 1.8.7 and beyond:

  define_method(:burninate) { |&block| block.call("burninating") }
  

.. in 1.8.6 you can’t use a block as a parameter of a block.

• Another pair noted that exceptions with Sunspot can cause wider failures on a site than just those that touch Solr. The symptom on this project was that if Solr was inaccessible for any reason every page on the site would throw an error. Their fix was to use Sunspot’s SessionProxy to wrap methods with some exception handling love.

• Lastly, GoRuCo — the Gotham Ruby Conference — will be held on May 22nd at Pace University’s downtown campus. The roster of talks is up and registration is open for business.