Reminder: Ruby private behaves differently

Assume you have the following dead simple class:

class Doc

  private

  def say
    "andy"
  end
end

We agree, that the method say is marked private and cannot be called like so:

> doc = Doc.new
> doc.say
NoMethodError: private method `say` called for #<Doc:0x007f8c93087c18>
from (irb):22

Ok. But you already know, that this does not mean, that you can’t access say from outside right? No? Here is the prove:

> doc = Doc.new
> doc.send(:say)
=> "andy" 

Oh!

I assume you have learned, that you can’t access private methods from a child class. That’s true for many programming languages. But not in Ruby. See this example:

class TextDoc < Doc
  def spoken_words
    say
  end
end

So we want to call say, what is declared private in the class Doc in spoken_words. Does this work?

> text_doc = TextDoc.new
> text_doc.spoken_words
=> "andy"

Oh! Wait. WTF?

The point in Ruby is, that the language does not prevent you from doing things if you really want to. It is your responsibility to deal with it - not the language implementors. Having these possibilities opens a lot of doors not only in Ruby’s meta-programming power, but helps also to write less and most importantly readable code. Visibility issues? It’s your responsibility as a developer to take care of.