I’ve been studying Ruby on Rails for a class project. I keep hearing “everything in Ruby is an object”. What I am not sure I understand is WHY that is a good thing, or maybe IF that is a good thing?
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I’ve been studying Ruby on Rails for a class project. I keep hearing “everything in Ruby is an object”. What I am not sure I understand is WHY that is a good thing, or maybe IF that is a good thing?
A counterexample would be that in Java
Integeris an object butintis not, which means different operations apply to both (admittedly in recent Java there is automatic conversion to/from the object version, but this can introduce unexpected performance issues). Objects are a little slower due to indirection, but more flexible; everything being an object means everything behaves consistently. Again Java would be an example: an array is not an object, andArrayIteratoris something that is bolted on after the fact (with multiple third party implementations, even) and therefore not quite consistent with the way collection class iterators work.