Kerry Buckley

Commenting seems to be broken on this blog since I upgraded WordPress. Not sure why yet, but I’m working on it.

[Update] It’s working again now.

I tend to agree that comments are, in most cases, evil (or at least mildly malevolent), but I did come across one of the exceptions to the rule today.

While doing a bit of drive-by refactoring while fixing a bug, I reflexively changed this line:
[ruby]
unless instance_response.nil?
[/ruby]
to this:
[ruby]
if instance_response
[/ruby]

Then reading the comment above the line, expecting to delete it, it all came flooding back:
[ruby]
# Use instance_response.nil? to check if the HTTParty
# response’s inner hash is empty.
# If you use ‘if instance_response’, it is always true.
[/ruby]

Now you could maybe argue that this unexpected behaviour is because httparty uses just a little too much of that old method missing proxy magic (which of course isn’t really magic at all), but that’s not the point of this post.

In the end I pulled it out into a private method to make it clearer what was going on, but decided to leave the comment in.

[ruby]
def self.instance_returned? instance_response
# Use instance_response.nil? to check if the HTTParty
# response’s inner hash is empty.
# If you use ‘if instance_response’, it is always true.
!instance_response.nil?
end
[/ruby]