Ruby is famous (infamous?) for giving us many ways to do the same thing. One aspect of this is that quite a few methods in core classes have aliases, especially in the Enumerable module. E.g.:

  • collect -> map
  • inject -> reduce
  • detect -> find
  • select -> find_all

Most Rubyists are probably aware that the “original” method names (collect, inject, etc) were inspired by Smalltalk and later the aliases where added to reflect the naming trends in the functional programming community. Enumerable#select is kind of special, as since Ruby 2.6 it has a second alias named filter, thus making the only Ruby method I can think of in this elite category. As a reminder here’s how the methods behave:

(1..10).find_all { |i| i % 3 == 0 }   #=> [3, 6, 9]

[1,2,3,4,5].select { |num| num.even? }   #=> [2, 4]

[:foo, :bar].filter { |x| x == :foo }   #=> [:foo]

I think today select is the most popular of the 3, but I can imagine that over time filter will give it a run for its money.1

The usage of aliases at this level has always been a bit controversial in the Ruby community. On one hand you make it easier for people coming from different backgrounds to find familiar methods, but on another you also confuse people a bit, as it’s not obvious that the different names are aliases. I’ve seen plenty of people asking what’s the difference between inject and reduce and so on.

What’s your preferred method to filter elements? Can you think of any other methods in the Ruby core classes that have multiple aliases?2 Please, share those in the comments!

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

P.S. As someone commented, Hash#include? is even more curious (weird?) as it has 3 (!!!) aliases:

  • has_key?
  • key?
  • member?

Will we be able to top this?

  1. I believe that filter is the terminology used in most programming languages. ↩

  2. Enumerable#filter! does not count! ;-) ↩