My Ruby Epiphany

I’ve been using and teaching Ruby for many years now, but I recently had an epiphany about indentation.

I’ve long been annoyed by private and its lesser-used siblings protected and public because I saw them as “keywords” that change the context.

class Idea
  def example_public_method
    ...
  end

  private

  def example_private_method
    ...
  end
end

I’ve described it before as changing how the parser sees methods as it reads from the top down. This never seemed very “Rubyish” to me. I had thought a block would make more sense:

class Idea
  def example_public_method
    ...
  end

  private do

    def example_private_method
      ...
    end

  end
end

But my recent epiphany made me realize I’ve been wrong the whole time: private is to class and end as else is to if and end.

if surprised?
  # do something
else
  # do something else
end

This also changes my mind in how we should indent it.

class Idea
  def example_public_method
    ...
  end

private

  def example_private_method
    ...
  end
end

I don’t know why it took me so many years to realize this. Anyone else with me?