ruby inheritance vs mixins

My take: Modules are for sharing behavior, while classes are for modeling relationships between objects. You technically could just make everything an instance of Object and mix in whatever modules you want to get the desired set of behaviors, but that would be a poor, haphazard and rather unreadable design.

I think mixins are a great idea, but there's another problem here that nobody has mentioned: namespace collisions. Consider:

module A
  HELLO = "hi"
  def sayhi
    puts HELLO
  end
end

module B
  HELLO = "you stink"
  def sayhi
    puts HELLO
  end
end

class C
  include A
  include B
end

c = C.new
c.sayhi

Which one wins? In Ruby, it turns out the be the latter, module B, because you included it after module A. Now, it's easy to avoid this problem: make sure all of module A and module B's constants and methods are in unlikely namespaces. The problem is that the compiler doesn't warn you at all when collisions happen.

I argue that this behavior does not scale to large teams of programmers-- you shouldn't assume that the person implementing class C knows about every name in scope. Ruby will even let you override a constant or method of a different type. I'm not sure that could ever be considered correct behavior.

I just read about this topic in The Well-Grounded Rubyist (great book, by the way). The author does a better job of explaining than I would so I'll quote him:

---

No single rule or formula always results in the right design. But it’s useful to keep a couple of considerations in mind when you’re making class-versus-module decisions:

• Modules don’t have instances. It follows that entities or things are generally best modeled in classes, and characteristics or properties of entities or things are best encapsulated in modules. Correspondingly, as noted in section 4.1.1, class names tend to be nouns, whereas module names are often adjectives (Stack versus Stacklike).

• A class can have only one superclass, but it can mix in as many modules as it wants. If you’re using inheritance, give priority to creating a sensible superclass/subclass relationship. Don’t use up a class’s one and only superclass relationship to endow the class with what might turn out to be just one of several sets of characteristics.

Summing up these rules in one example, here is what you should not do:

module Vehicle 
... 
class SelfPropelling 
... 
class Truck < SelfPropelling 
  include Vehicle 
... 

Rather, you should do this:

module SelfPropelling 
... 
class Vehicle 
  include SelfPropelling 
... 
class Truck < Vehicle 
... 

The second version models the entities and properties much more neatly. Truck descends from Vehicle (which makes sense), whereas SelfPropelling is a characteristic of vehicles (at least, all those we care about in this model of the world)—a characteristic that is passed on to trucks by virtue of Truck being a descendant, or specialized form, of Vehicle.