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Comment by hamandcheese | Hacker News Reader

Is there any real harm though? Free functions pollute the global namespace, which is something I tend to avoid (at least in Ruby where everything shares the same namespace).

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Just put the function in a namespace?

In Ruby, that basically comes down to creating a static class.

In terms of ruby, we may be splitting hairs when it comes to namespaces vs classes. Modules, which are typically used for namespacing, can have state and extend themselves, making them effectively singleton classes.

> Modules, which are typically used for namespacing, can have state

But there's nothing about state that makes it specific to classes. Namespaces in C++ can hold (static) state, for example. So it's actually the other way around: singleton classes can effectively be namespaces/modules.

Object without state but with functions is just a namespace. But that depends on how the language implements it.

In Ruby that looks a lot like what the article says is an anti-pattern.

What's the difference between polluting the global namespace with a class name, or with a function name?

I get it, I also experience some reticience when adding free/bare functions in Swift. But maybe it's because of 15 years of OOP programming.

Maybe not so much of a problem in C++ but look at JavaScript. With the millions of dependencies / libraries you import, if they all used free standing functions you would inevitably end up with collisions.

In c++ functions can be marked ‘static’ to make them translation-unit local, or you can put them in a library namespace, if they’re public. In a particular js bundler/runtime usually a module system is used (or just iife/umd wrap) which prevents function names from populating globals.

The problem is unqualified imports though, not free functions.

Maybe the problem here is the global namespace. I really like modern javascript where you have to explicitly import everything.

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