David Vollbracht

Here’s a little hack for Ruby classes that comes from a project.

  class Class
    def to_proc
      method(:new).to_proc
    end
  end

If you’ve ever used map (a.k.a. collect) to create a bunch of objects you might be familiar with code that looks something like this.

   value_list.map {|v| Something.new(v)}

With Class#to_proc this can be simplified to

  value_list.map(&Something)

This works very well for map, but I haven’t seen Class#to_proc become useful in any other situation to date. Even changing map to collect changes my opinion of it’s expressiveness. I don’t know that Class#to_proc is pulls its weight in our situation, but I just like the map statement above too much to give it up.