I was recently asked whether Ruby had a way of honoring the Interface Segregation Principle (ISP). ISP says that a client of an API should only depend on the methods it needs/cares about. In languages like Java, ISP is easy to manage with static typing and judicious use of Interfaces. Ruby doesn't have the same thing, though. Consider the following example:
Let's say that you want to put the controls to fly and land a drone in the hands of someone with Secret clearance, but restrict access to operations like taking pictures and launching missiles to a client with a different security clearance. The problem with the Drone class is that the methods for doing all of the operations are visible to anyone with a reference to a Drone instance. ISP says that the lower-level clearance client should only be able to see a subset of all of the methods on a Drone instance. We can't control this on the instance itself very easily because the class is defined to expose all methods to anyone with a reference to an instance of it.
What you can do in Ruby is present access to an object via a proxy to it using the Forwardable module. In the example below, the Pilotable class tells Forwardable where to send invocations of the methods "take_off", "land", and "fly_to". Any other method invocation will blow up. An object of Pilotable class doesn't expose the reference to an aircraft it is wrapping, instead it simply provides a means of invoking a subset of its methods.
This is the essence of the Interface Segregation Principle: provide a client with an interface limited only to the methods needed in the context of the client's interaction.
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