Naming Too Good

Some words should not be chosen as identifiers for variables, parameters and methods in Ruby, because they clash with core methods or keywords.

As long as you do not define a method with the name of a keyword, Ruby will not complain. Still, it is often better to avoid naming things like existing methods. It carries potential for future bugs and also confuses newcomers. You might change the name in the future, but miss some occurrences, which will then do something completely different. It also makes debugging harder.

A simple workaround is to append an _ to critical identifiers. Some variables names that I find myself wanting to choose sometimes, but which should not (or cannot) be used:

class

class is a keyword so this is invalid code:

class = Thread

When referencing classes in your code the most common convention is to use klass instead.

in

An example where this rarely used keyword (which is part of the for loop syntax) prevents good naming is working with streams:

require 'open3'
Open3.popen3(cmd){ |in, out, err|
  # ...
}

method

A common pattern:

def send_somewhere(method, something)
  # ...
  public_send(method)
  # ...
end

Conflicts with: Object#method

hash

Calculating a hash:

require "digest/sha2"
hash = Digest::SHA256.hexdigest "ö"

Conflicts with: Object#hash

format

"format" is a typical name for a keyword argument:

def something(format: "json")
  # ...
end

I still do it sometimes, but it conflicts with: Kernel#format

display

Object#display should also be avoided!

More Idiosyncratic Ruby