A couple days ago during a code review one of my coworkers noticed that we called the super method with no parameters and still had parenthesis. They wanted to remove it; however, it turns out in Ruby that super does some extra magic that you need to be careful about.

To begin we need to talk about class inheritance; a concept most if not all object oriented based languages use. Let’s look at some Ruby code and explore this concept.

class Widget
  attr_reader :id, :name
 
  def initialize(id='', name='')
    @id = id
    @name = name
  end
end
 
class Sprocket < Widget
  attr_reader :type
 
  def initialize(*_args)
    super
    @type = name[/t-(\d*)/, 1]
  end
end

When the Sprocket class re-defines the initialize method, you can use super to call the parent class method. With Ruby; however, super acts a little different than other method calls. When you use a “naked” call to super like in the code example above on line 14, it gets passed all of the parameters that the child method receives.

For this reason, if you want to override the default functionality you have to call super() so Ruby knows not to pass all of the parameters down to the parent class method. This doesn’t happen to often, but when it does it can catch you by surprise.

Another thing I discovered when playing around with super for this post is you shouldn’t name a method this:

class Thing
  def yell
    "heyyy!"
  end
 
  def super
    "super sweet"
  end
end
 
class ThingABobber < Thing
  def yell
    super + '!!!'
  end
 
  def icecream
    super + ' icecream!'
  end
 
  def lollipop
    self.super + ' lollipop'
  end
 
  def candy
    send(:super) + ' candy'
  end
end
 
ThingABobber.new.yell # => "heyyy!!!!"
Thing.new.super # => "super sweet"
ThingABobber.new.icecream # => NoMethodError: super: no superclass method 'icecream'
ThingABobber.new.lollipop # => "super sweet lollipop"
ThingABobber.new.candy # => "super sweet candy"

It turns out super not bound to an object tries to call a higher inherited method. However; if you use self.super or try sending it with send(:super) it will call the method defined as super. I would highly recommend naming a method super, but, it does look like it won’t mess up how it works if you take extreme care.