Why I stopped inheriting from ruby’s core Array class and why you shouldn’t inherit from ruby’s core classes too

Inheritance is considered bad practice for quite some time now (Gamma, Helm, Johnson & Vlissides, 1994). Little did I know when I started the ‘workbook’-project in 2012 (note that I don’t have a computer science background).

The main reason I wrote this workbook-gem was that I wanted the most predictable API for working with spreadsheet data (acting as arrays of arrays), not having to use a different API when reading XLSX or CSV files, nor when writing it.

After learning that inheritance is not always a good thing, I still often thought of a workbook as an array of arrays and hence an exception to the rule. But then I came accross a helpful post by Avdi Grimm: Why you shouldn’t inherit from Ruby’s core classes (and what to do instead). Of course, a lot of what I wanted from the ruby core Array-class could also be offered by including Enumerable.

Performance improvement?

So while still thinking of a workbook as a 4-dimensional array, I put up the challange just for the sake of improving my ruby skills. It took a few days to make all tess pass again. And while I don’t think the code cleaned up by a lot, which was something I had hoped for, I was most surprised to see that my tests ran ~25% faster. First the tests ran in about ~9,8s, now they finished in ~7,3s (even with some additional assertions). This might be a huge advantage for reading and writing larger workbooks.

It is now obvious to me why. I had been reimplementing a lot of fast, C-compiled code, in ruby. This not only ran slow because of ruby, but also because I created alternative ways of accessing data within the array structure (e.g. not only finding a value in a cell by an index, but also the header column name, or finding a cell from a table using the typical spreadsheet reference, e.g. “A2”).

Keep challenging what you think you know

Today I’ve also closed an almost 6 year old self requested feature that asked for inheriting from ruby core classes for the cell values.

While this story might be quite specific to a little project I am maintaining, it is especially important to challenge your ideas about how things should work when you’re maintaining something mostly on your own.

Photo by Ylanite Koppens from Pexels