Do use parentheses in Rails

In this article I will explain why you should ALWAYS use parentheses in method calls.

Assume you have the following code in your Rails views:

link_to 'Articles', articles_path

then you decide that you need to add I18n (internationalization) to your application and you replace all strings with

I18n.t 'ui.articles'

which gives you:

link_to I18n.t 'ui.articles', articles_path

See the problem? This line will not raise any exceptions. Just link to the wrong page. Very hard to catch unless you have proper tests set up.