A word of warning

And now a "a word of warning" (sic) from the ActiveRecord API docs:


Don‘t create associations that have the same name as instance methods of ActiveRecord::Base. Since the association adds a method with that name to its model, it will override the inherited method and break things. For instance, attributes and connection would be bad choices for association names.


Reading that was another one of those "No. Really." moments.


The second time an undetected collision of this type got me (note to self: don't name a database column "errors" unless you have an afternoon to spare) I really considered some shell (better yet Perl, heh) scripts to grep out all the method names from all the plugins + my code and check for collisions. I now instinctively avoid any obvious or intuitive sounding name for a column or method. Since we're up to a dozen+ plugins, it's probably in use already.


The interpreter could issue a warning of some kind when overloading and a test flag was set, I suppose. HEY! Agile means no whining. Suck it up and KEEP TYPING!