Ruby is a dynamic interpreted language and this time I’m gonna talk about how it handles classes and how dead simple it feels like.

The day I learned what I’m gonna show you here I had my mind blown. Hopefully I’ll give you the same feeling.

Let’s start with a simple class. Do you know what is self in each of these places?

self                                              # => main
self.class                                        # => Object

class Person
  self                                            # => Person
  self.class                                      # => Class
end

As you can see, when we’re in the root level, we’re actually inside an Object called main. Now when inside the class definition, self becomes the class itself, which is an instance of the Class class.

Pay attention to this statement: an instance of the Class class. That’s right. Classes are just plain old objects of Class.

Now let me show you a different way of creating a new class:

Product = Class.new
Product                                           # => Product
Product.class                                     # => Class

We just create new instances of Class. It’s that simple.

That constructor can also take an argument, which is the superclass. This is how you can define inheritance.

Apparel = Class.new(Product)
Apparel                                           # => Product
Apparel.class                                     # => Class
Apparel.ancestors                                 # => [Apparel, Product, Object, Kernel, BasicObject]

By the way, the Class#ancestors method allows you to see all the inheritance chain for a class.

The Ruby classes I’ve shown you this far are constants, but they don’t need to be. Check this out:

product = Class.new
product                                           # => #<Class:0x00007f9a48018238>
product.class                                     # => Class

Constants in Ruby are pretty much just variables that start with an upper case letter. In this example product is a variable, not a constant, just because it starts with a lower case letter.

Did you notice the difference, though? Because now product is a variable and not a constant, it does not get a name assigned to it. You can see that in the output: you see the memory address, not the class name. That’s what Ruby does for you behind the scenes when you assign a new class to a constant: it defines its name based on the constant name.

Now let’s dive into another Ruby feature: class methods. First an example you’re probably very familiar with:

class Person
  def self.table_name
    'people'
  end
end
Person.table_name                                 # => "people"

Here you have a simple class method defined. Not much going on here, right? But now that you know what self means inside that context, is it more clear for you how that works?

If not, let me show you how we would define that method for the Product class, which is created with Class.new:

def Product.table_name
  'products'
end
Product.table_name                                # => "products"

Can you see how these methods are defined? You pass them the object you want to attach the method to. self in the first example is Person. In the second example we use Product, which is the constant we created manually.

This doesn’t apply only to classes. You can use that to define the so called singleton methods in specific objects. Check this out:

diego = Person.new
def diego.last_name
  'Selzlein'
end

john = Person.new

diego.last_name                                   # => "Selzlein"
john.last_name                                    # =>

# ~> -:55:in `<main>': undefined method `last_name' for #<Person:0x00007fba7f005000> (NoMethodError)

As you can see, when you do that only the object for which you defined the method will respond to that method.

And lastly, remember that when in the root level of the Ruby code we were actually inside the Object class? Almost all classes in Ruby inherit from Object. And this is why when you define a method in the root level context it becomes accessible almost everywhere: because you are almost always inside a class that inherits from the Object class:

self.class                                        # => Object
def say_hello
  'Hello!'
end
say_hello                                         # => "Hello!"

class Person
  def anything
    say_hello
  end
end
Person.new.anything                               # => "Hello!"

Well, that covers it for this episode. Thank you for watching and I hope you enjoyed this snack!