I guess what I mean is that you should split the pull request into two commits so that I can approve them separately.  In this case, I don't think the change is warranted unless it is similarly changed in all other locations. Unless I'm missing something, the only other place a method parameter is set with a default value is in lib/metrics/hotspots/analysis/table.rb .  You are correct that most empty hashes are initialized with spaces. I know it's not important to pick one or the other, I'm just reflecting on the current state of the code base.