Why aren't rails helpers more object-oriented?

Question

For example, why are the date helpers written like this:

time_ago_in_words(@from_time)

Instead of like this:

@from_time.time_ago_in_words

Is this a clear design error / inconsistency? Or is there some reason for this?

Answer 1

Helpers are methods on the view object, rather than on the object they're displaying. This makes sense in an OO sense because the view is displaying the data in a particular format, so it's in charge of converting the models to that format.