Concept overloading madness

[jerith]

I recently had cause to go delving into the documentation for Ruby's open() method. While I found the information I needed fairly quickly, I was appalled to discover that open() will happily open a pipe to a subprocess (if the path parameter starts with "|") and even fork your app (if the path parameter is

Comments

[kazriko]

The fact that Ruby is heavily reliant on Perl for many of its idioms is something that always irks me when I go to use it.

[jerith]

Part of what precipitated this post was an unconfirmed rumour (when I was ranting about it on IM) that Python might be heading in the same direction with open(). I'd like to think it isn't ("explicit is better than implicit") but I've been out on the fringes of the Python community for too long to know where to look for confirmation.

[kazriko]

*ugh*

I can see one place where it would be useful. When you go to open a file in a GUI app, it'd be nice to be able to put in a URL or some other thing. It'd be better, though, if instead of a open() handling all of them, they provided you with a function that would give you the appropriate object to call .open() on to handle that path. That would let the user explicitly support arbitrary special paths like that without a huge amount of code, but leave the unsuspecting from inadvertently creating a huge security hole in their system because they used open() and someone sent them a |- from a web page.

filetype.gethandler(path).open(path)

[jerith]

I'd be fairly happy with open_anything() translating behind the scenes and giving me a file-like. I don't believe it should popen() (which lets you run arbitrary code) or fork() (which confuses the hell out of everything) though. I see the current Ruby (and, I suppose, Perl) behaviour as dangerous and not quite sane.

[southernmyst]

*hugs*

Of course, you know what this means. You need to make your own programming language and then get with the marketers at MicroSoft to make sure it's almost the only one used. ;)

[jerith]

Nah, I haven't had nearly enough exposure to different programming paradigms to be able to do that. Besides, it sounds too much like hard work...

[southernmyst]

Silly jerith. You hire cheap Elbonian labor to do the hard work while you occupy yourself with ravishings from me all day ;P

[jerith]

Ooh, I like that idea. Got any spare Elbonians?