Glossary

The words and phrases you'll hear thrown around the Ruby community, A to Z.

Chunky bacon

A nonsense catchphrase from _why's Poignant Guide, and a pure inside joke.

Convention over Configuration

Rails' defining idea: sensible defaults instead of endless setup.

Duck Typing

Judge an object by what it can do, not by the class it belongs to.

Everything is an Object

In Ruby even a plain number or nil is a real object you can call methods on.

Gem-naming culture

Ruby libraries are called gems, and Rubyists love giving them punny, whimsical names.

MINASWAN

"Matz is nice and so we are nice." The community's core social rule.

Monkey Patching

Reopening an existing class at runtime to change it, for better and for worse.

MRI / CRuby / YARV

Three names for the standard Ruby you download: whose it is, what it is written in, and the engine inside.

"Optimize for programmer happiness"

Ruby's founding value: bend the language toward joy, not the machine.

Principle of Least Surprise (POLS)

Ruby tries to behave the way you would expect. But least surprise to whom, exactly?

puts debugging

Finding a bug by sprinkling humble print statements, no fancy debugger required.

"Rails is omakase"

Let the framework choose for you, like a sushi chef's tasting menu.

"Ruby is dead"

The recurring claim that Ruby is dying, and the specific, sourced reason it is not: it still ships every year and still runs some of the busiest, most valuable companies on the web.

The Pickaxe

The nickname for the first big English Ruby book (there is a pickaxe on the cover).

The Wrong Abstraction

"Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction." Sandi Metz's warning against over-tidying code.