5. Metaprogramming
In Ruby, everything is open to modification at run time. Classes, modules, and even the behavior of individual objects can all be changed while a program is running. It’s trivial to write code which defines new classes or adds methods to an existing class or object. Virtually nothing is off-limits. This so-called “metaprogramming” is one of Ruby’s most powerful features. It’s also one of its most dangerous.
There are a lot of good uses for metaprogramming. Cleaning up redundant code, generalizing a feature to work with more than one class, and creating domain specific languages are just a few examples. But there are downsides too. Methods like eval tend to become a crutch since they can be used to solve so many programming ...
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