Practical Metaprogramming
I have completed a second major release of a library that fully conjugates Classical Latin verbs in each of their 133 froms * 5 standard paradigms.
Owing to the irregularity of human communication, modeling the provision of unambiguous answers (return values) to ambiguously asked things (flexible / incomplete method calls) might have required hundreds, if not thousands, of method definitions or static values entered in a database.
But what if heuristics could be given to a Ruby class such that it "thought" as language learners are taught to think? What if it could be taught to be flexible in respecting the ambiguous calls given and to still give precise, correct answers back - as human language learners are capable of doing? By adopting this design paradigm code could become leaner and more reflective of human cognitive process.
Thankfully for Rubyists, this is not a dream, this is reality. Our programs can operate more intelligently, more heuristically, and more insightfully. We can save ourselves days of development time by integrating the next tier of metaprogramming patterns I seek to demonstrate. This is perhaps what makes Ruby so unique, so mysterious, so enticing and so special.
- Metaprogramming is "just programming"
- Virtually all core libraries make use of metaprogramming
Goals:
- Bold metaprogramming
- Learn ancestor chain (for lookups)
- Real worl example
- Learn ancestor chain
