Learning the pros and cons of abstraction
Unlike in many other programming languages, metaprogramming in Ruby isn't that much different than regular programming. Many other programming languages implement metaprogramming with a preprocessor before compilation or a macro processor during compilation, and there are things you can do in the metaprogramming environment that you cannot do in the runtime environment and vice versa. Thankfully, Ruby has no such restrictions on its metaprogramming. You use the same syntax for metaprogramming that you use for regular programming, and you can do metaprogramming at any time.
The main difference between programming and metaprogramming in Ruby is conceptual. Conceptually in Ruby, metaprogramming operates at a higher realm of abstraction than regular programming. If regular programming in Ruby uses classes to create objects and modify the data in those objects, metaprogramming in Ruby creates new classes and modifies the methods in those...