One base class to rule them all.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2011/one-base-class-to-rule-them-all

by davepeck • 15 years ago

325 40 15 years ago

destroyallsoftware.com

jtchang• 15 years ago

Wow a pull request and forks already. Is there anything Ruby can't do?

damncabbage• 15 years ago

I'd be laughing if I didn't fear that I'd someday be running into (or working with) someone who uses this.

derwildemomo• 15 years ago

exactly my first thought..

coreycollins• 15 years ago

I was cringing all the way down through this article. Thank god for the last paragraph.

stuffihavemade• 15 years ago

Great gem. But why not include it in module form so I can mix it into BasicObject?

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

I think I may have just had a brain hemorrhage.

joshuaxls• 15 years ago

As long as we're being silly with Ruby metaprogramming, my favorite: https://github.com/thorncp/fsck

Fsck allows you to express your feelings while you're developing. It does this by allowing you to add words to method names on the fly.

idonthack• 15 years ago

How clever. I've been inspired, I'm going to write a module named "mkfs" and it will do absolutely nothing related to making a filesystem

phillmv2• 15 years ago

Yeah! Your joke library that appeals to a niche audience is really going to fill that second page of google results.

RodgerTheGreat• 15 years ago

I'm getting some serious Poe's Law vibes from this thing. If not for the disclaimer I would be rightly terrified.

garybernhardt3• 15 years ago

I was tempted to leave the disclaimer off, both in the README and the blog post. But I think there's a strong enough chance of someone actually using it as it is... ;)

jerf• 15 years ago

Clearly the next step is to hook this up to http://www.goto.info.waseda.ac.jp/~fukusima/ruby/python/doc/... , https://github.com/zephirworks/ruby-perl , and http://jmettraux.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/ruby-to-lua/ . Truly one language to rule them all.

harel• 15 years ago

I started reading this seriously and at some point just burst out laughing. First 'tech text' to make me laugh like that. Very good.

KevinEldon• 15 years ago

This base class (all your methods are belong to us?) is amusing, but the screencasts on Destroy All Software are pretty helpful. The $9/month was worth it for the continuous performance testing w/ RSpec explanation: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/blog/2011/continuous-auto...

I am in no way affiliated w/ Destroy All Software other than being a happy new customer.

rohitarondekar• 15 years ago

The screencasts are definitely very helpful. Also since they are not very long, they don't take much time to watch and you learn quite a lot.

sli• 15 years ago

Huh... I had no idea that a cantaloupe has five days.

Groxx2• 15 years ago

Neither did I. Isn't Ruby amazing?!

billybob• 15 years ago

I think that assumes refrigeration.

jroseattle• 15 years ago

Issue #2 (https://github.com/garybernhardt/base/issues/2) is pure gold.

What license is this released under? I would assume an awesome base class needs a corresponding awesome license.

saurik• 15 years ago

My preference would be "all OSI approved licenses; not any one in particular, but all of them at once" (and yes: this might legally conflict, but I think that would be a feature in this case, allowing for even more hilarious descriptions).

garybernhardt3• 15 years ago

Done: https://github.com/garybernhardt/base/commit/65e8ca5d432be72...

bdonlan• 15 years ago

IANAL, but it's my understanding that there's no particular conflict here. You'd be licensing the same work under multiple licenses; if any one of them authorizes some particular use, that's enough to be an affirmative defense against copyright infringement. If you violate the terms of one license, that particular license may become void, but as long as some others remain, you're fine.

In other words, licenses don't make certain uses of works forbidden; they make them _permitted_. If you license it under both GPLv3 and BSD, and someone does something permitted under BSD but forbidden under GPLv3, the GPLv3 can't forbid the BSD license.

That said, the current wording (the 'union of the terms specified' by all OSI licenses) is not multiply licensing, but something far stranger...

spullara• 15 years ago

Hey, look! They made C! :)

silentbicycle2• 15 years ago

Of course it's Ruby.

garybernhardt3• 15 years ago

I could port it to Python if you want? ;) I probably wouldn't have done this when Python was my main language, though. That community has a much harder time laughing at itself than Ruby's does.

silentbicycle2• 15 years ago

Maybe C or k? ;)

cbs• 15 years ago

Python already has one base class to rule them all, `object`. From just the title I thought that's what the post was going to be about.

draegtun• 15 years ago

Fortunately the Perl community have no trouble laughing at itself either! So here's a port to Perl :) https://gist.github.com/1204277

Moose's MOP makes this "port" quite easy (as does Perl having multiple inheritance!). Does mean it only works on Moose classes but a universal approach is also possible but it wouldn't be as succinct!

Confusion• 15 years ago

I'm sorry, but why is this joke being upvoted so much? It hardly seems HN material to me: I'm sure we've all jokingly considered about something like this once. I doubt anyone learned anything from it.

dwhitney• 15 years ago

awsome

adgar• 15 years ago

Pull request 5: Auto-require every gem.

https://github.com/garybernhardt/base/pull/5

Wow.

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

My favourite idiotic ruby gem: Tenderlove's NeverSayDie, which allows you to resuce segfaults.

https://github.com/tenderlove/neversaydie

I seem to remember a gem that allowed for inline assembly too, but perhaps fortunately I can't remember what it's called.

judofyr2• 15 years ago

Wilson: https://github.com/seattlerb/wilson

JonnieCache3• 15 years ago

Ah, thanks, and now I've remembered where I saw these: tenderlove's "Worst Ideas Ever" talk at rubyconf, where he and ryan davis basically try and run all this shit at the same time, so they're rescuing segfaults then fixing them using inline assembly, cross compiling rails 2.3's AST into XML and then executing it, cross compiling rails into PHP, and all sorts of awful shit. Hilarious.

http://confreaks.net/videos/198-rubyconf2009-worst-ideas-eve...

One base class to rule them all.

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