Jon Allured

Computer Programmer, Whiskey Drinker, Comic Book Reader

The Simpleton Pattern; When to Include, When to Extend

published 01/31/12

After my post on the Singleton pattern, fellow Rocketeer Stephen Caudill directed me towards Steve Yegge's post on the Simpleton Pattern. Its a fairly snarky post, but there's real insight to be had. I think his main point is that the Singleton pattern is overused and that its usually bad design to use it because of its global nature.

Yegge says that the Singleton is actually a throwback to non OO programming, that it is an escape hatch one can use when OO gets too intense. He talks about how he loved this pattern and used it quite a bit until he realized that all he was doing was using these classes as namespaces for global functions. Its great to read criticism like this, helps me have a more well-rounded view of things.


I haven't had much experience with writing Modules in Ruby and so I've always been a little confused about the difference between include and extend, but Aaron Lasseigne's write up on the topic was really helpful. He starts out by giving us the common definition of when you use one or the other:

You include a module to add instance methods to a class and extend to add class methods.

He goes on to explain why this isn't the whole story, staring with how instance and class methods are stored. So, given this class:

class Klass
  def foo; end
  def self.bar; end
end

You can find #foo and .bar like this:

Klass.new.methods - methods # => [:foo]
Klass.methods - Object.methods # => [:bar]
Klass.singleton_methods # => [:bar]

I had never seen Object#singleton_methods before and I got curious what else was out there, so I jumped over to irb and ran:

Object.methods.select { |method| method.to_s =~ /single/ }
# => [:singleton_class, :singleton_methods, :define_singleton_method]

And this is when I remembered some conversations Brian Dunn (another Rocketeer) and I have had about the eigenclass. I went hunting for more information to make sure I was putting this together correctly and found a write up from Andrea Singh that confirmed it.

When .bar is defined for Klass, its actually being defined on the eigenclass of Klass, thus the singleton_methods method inspects this for methods and that's what its returning.

Lasseigne then defines include and extend with this information in mind:

include: adds methods from the provided Module to the object extend: calls include on the singleton class (eigenclass) of the object

Reading these two posts and their diagrams really helped clarify that the Eigenclass is just another name for the Singleton class that's created when you define methods on an object and the relationship between Module instance methods and class methods with the thing that's getting them mixed in.