Olivier Lacan

“So this is, like, if I took a spaceship to Titan — the moon of Jupiter — and I saw Taco Bell there, I’d be like: ‘No.’”.

This comes from a conversation I had while pairing the other day. Let me bring in some context. I had showed Morgan — the newest member of our Internal Code School team — how awesome Bash autocompletions are inside a shell session, especially when dealing with unfamiliar file names.

For example you want to cd into a folder called banana, all you have to do is type cd bana then hit the Tab key and tadaaa it suddenly morphs into cd banana/ before your very eyes.

Morgan and I had to debug a spec in which we put a binding.pry call from the excellent Pry gem in order to stop execution and fumble around to figure out why a specific test was behaving oddly. We had defined a user variable and I asked morgan to call a method on that ActiveRecord instance this variable was pointing too. As she started to type out the full method name I think I sneakily hit her Tab key with the swiftness of a famished Fox.

To my surprise, Morgan wasn’t happy about this at all. Her response was:

“No.”

She didn’t say that because this little trick wasn’t cool. She didn’t say it because it wasn’t useful. She didn’t say it because it’s kind of a dick move to take over your pair’s keyboard — it is — while pairing. She said “No.” because she didn’t understand how the Pry session could possibly allow her to do this: use autocompletion on a Ruby object’s methods.

After laughing (a lot) she used the sentence I started this post with to help me understand how she felt. Aside from being hilarious, it was a very good example. Magic (in the context of programming) isn’t cool, it’s simply useful — sometimes. What’s really cool, and I bet Morgan would agree with me, is how what appears to be magic actually works. Because there is no such thing as magic.

Do you think I took the time to explain to Morgan how this awesome method autocompletion trick works? Nope. Why? Well, I had no idea how it worked.

Now, thanks in part to a great blog post by Ross Kaff — Ruby, You Autocomplete Me — I do understand how it works. So I thought I’d share it with you too.

Guess what? It’s definitely not magic. Ross’ post didn’t fully satisfy my curiosity so I ended up looking at the IRB::InputCompletor source code in Ruby and it was illuminating.

This is one of the few times in my life when — despite being a Ruby programmer — I have looked at the actual Ruby source code to understand how something works. Every time I discover coding conventions I’m either not familiar with or didn’t expect to find there.

What’s amusing when you start [unweaving the magic rainbow] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unweaving_the_Rainbow) is that you discover how simple things actually are.

IRB::Completion uses a gigantic case statement against the inputed text on which completion is attempted. So if you run pry¹ and type:

1
"Howdy".rev

And hit the Tab key, it will complete to "Howdy".reverse. Why?

1. the input before you hit the Tab key starts with a double quote which means IRB::Completion’s first when statement catches it.
2. the receiver (first match returned by the regular expression) is saved to a variable using the $1 global variable².
3. the third match from the regular expression (the second one being the . separating the receiver from method (or method call) is saved to the message variable.
4. Using one of my favorite bit of Ruby introspection, all the possible instance methods available³ to the String class are collected (an alias of the Enumerable#map method) into a candidates array.
5. The select_message class method is called with the receiver, message, and candidates in order to determine what methods should be suggested for completion.

That’s it. All the possible candidate methods will now be displayed in the console as completion suggestions when you hit the Tab key twice. If there is only one match, hitting the Tab key once will complete the method name using that match.

1
"Howdy".reverse

Having people with different skill levels and backgrounds on our team has been a perfect opportunity for me to rediscover the things that I take for granted. When you’re new it’s often difficult (but not impossible) to understand how some of the things you use work. There are many tools I grown comfortable using and yet I don’t fully understand how they work. As I hope I’ve demonstrated, it doesn’t take very long to understand how the tricks are done.