Jake Worth

It’s hard to enforce unconventional preferences on a team. Default to convention.

Consider this contrived example. Imagine that you don’t like Ruby accessors, which work like this:

class Dog
  attr_accessor :bark
end

> Dog.instance_methods.take(2)
=> [:bark, :bark=] # Dog has a gettor and a settor for @bark

Preferring the verbose alternatives:

class Dog
  def bark
    @bark
  end

  def bark=(sound)
    @bark = sound
  end
end

> Dog.instance_methods.take(2)
=> [:bark, :bark=] # Same gettor and settor

You advocate for this more verbose style on your team and expect to see it in code reviews.

The challenge with this preference is that this style of accessors is a Ruby convention. It’s been part of the standard library for a long time. Everyone understands it. It’s boring.

By bucking convention, you’re inviting inconsistency into your code. Programmers may follow the pattern on existing files, but they’ll forget to on new files. Unless you’re watching every PR or have installed tooling to enforce your preference, attr_accessor will drift into your code.