I came across some sample interview questions for a senior Ruby developer the other day, and one of them caught my eye:

Write a single line of Ruby code that prints the Fibonacci sequence of any length as an array.

“Huh,” I thought, “that sounds fun.” I took this to mean, there was a single-line method that could take a number, like 10 for example, and return the first 10 Fibonacci numbers:

>  fib(10)
=> [1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55]

So I wrote a test for cover the bases:

class FibonacciTest < Minitest::Test
  def test_one_fibonacci_number
    assert_equal [1], fib(1)
  end

  def test_two_fibonacci_numbers
    assert_equal [1,1], fib(2)
  end

  def test_three_fibonacci_numbers
    assert_equal [1,1,2], fib(3)
  end

  def test_ten_fibonacci_numbers
    assert_equal [1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55], fib(10)
  end
end

Just to get some code on the page, I began with an ugly, shameless, multi-line solution:

def fib(count)
  i = 1
  results = []
  while i <= count do
    if i < 3
      results << 1
    else
      results << results[-1] + results[-2]
    end
    i = i + 1
  end
  return results
end

Ok, that worked. Now what? It has to get down to one line somehow. My process was to work this like a normal refactoring and see what jumped out at me. The first thing I noticed was that I don’t have keep a counter if I use a range operation. Replacing the while with Range gets us:

def fib(count)
  results = []
  (1..count).each do |i|
    if i < 3
      results << 1
    else
      results << results[-1] + results[-2]
    end
  end
  return results
end

We’ve eliminated the while loop, cut out a few lines, and the counter variable. The next thing that jumps out is results. Is there a way we can stop obsessing over the results array?

Full disclosure: I cheated a bit.

I looked up solutions on Stack Exchange, but the honest truth is, I didn’t understand them. None of them did exactly what I was trying to do, so I was going to have to dig further. I noticed a lot of them used the inject method, which I’d never heard of before. Looking that up gave me an idea: we can pass an array into inject to start the process going and not have to initialize it outside of the loop:

def fib(count)
  (1..count).inject([]) do |results, i|
    if i < 3
      results << 1
    else
      results << results[-1] + results[-2]
    end
  end
end

Nice! Now we’re getting somewhere. Next, I looked at the conditional. Knowing a little bit about the sequence, the first two numbers are always 1. If we use that, we can seed the array we’re passing in and avoid the conditional:

def fib(count)
  (1..count).inject([1,1]) do |results, i|
    results << results[-1] + results[-2]
  end
end

But, this gives us errors because our count is no longer correct. I need to account (pun intended) for the seeded array:

def fib(count)
  (1..count-2).inject([1,1]) do |results, i|
    results << results[-1] + results[-2]
  end
end

We still have one outstanding error:

Failure:
FibonacciTest#test_one_fibonacci_number [fib.rb:11]:
Expected: [1]
  Actual: [1, 1]

When the range is negative, inject still executes. There is no value passed for i, so it just returns the array [1,1]. This is okay if our count is 2, but if it’s 1, we need to ensure the array we’re returning is only as long as the count:

def fib(count)
  (1..count-2).inject([1,1]) do |results, i|
    results << results[-1] + results[-2]
  end[0..count-1]
end

It looks a bit odd, but we can transform it into one line thusly:

def fib(count)
  (1..count-2).inject([1,1]) { |results, i| results << results[-1] + results[-2] }[0..count-1]
end

All done…except! This is technically three lines with the method definition. Using a lambda we can remove that too, so it’s truly one line:

fib = ->(count) { (1..count-2).inject([1,1]) { |results, i| results << results[-1] + results[-2] }[0..count-1] }

And then it can be invoked like a Proc:

>  fib.call(10)
=> [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55]

Further Thoughts

I couldn’t handle the zero case, fib.call(0), which might ought to return an empty array. Maybe there’s something else hidden there waiting to be refactored.

Lately, I’ve been avoiding one-liners because they obfuscate things. I probably would have stopped at a three-line method and left it at that, but the challenge is more to test your deeper understanding of Ruby’s methods.