articles tagged bang

how to bang...like a boss

In the Ruby programming language, there exists two characters you are only permitted to use when naming a method: ? and !. These special permissions are designed to allow you to establish a certain level of convention in your method naming, for example, a method ending in "?" in Ruby is mosty likely always going to return a Boolean response of true or false. Not only is this convention not questioned much, but there seems to be very little sensible use out of making a "?" method not return a boolean response. At eLocal, we use "!" as a generalized YOLO convention. It means we're about to execute some actions which may fail, or are connecting to an outside resource (such as an API or our mothership site) In either case, the "!" dictates that our app's control flow should stop.