We have a couple of interns in the office this summer. They are kind of like Jr. Apprentices and are distinguished mostly by the fact that they are in school and will be returning to school in the fall.

I’ve been working with Andrew this summer. He just finished his Sophomore year of High School and is just learning to program.

He's been working through a couple of ruby tutorials: Chris Pine’s Learn to Program in Ruby and the ever-so-entertaining-especially-for-a-high-schooler Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby.

He was working on the Orange Tree example for Pine’s tutorial. He had the class written and want to write a command line interface to it. This was what he tried to do.

tree = OrangeTree.new
command = gets.chomp
tree.command(command)

“What are you trying to do Andrew?”

“I want to get a command from the user and call that command on the tree object.”

Now I had expected that Andrew would write a big if-else chain comparing strings and calling methods.

In my mind that’s what a beginning programmer should learn. I learned to program in C++ and that’s the way I had to do it! I wasn’t even sure that we would even touch meta-programming this summer.

But I had a second thought:

“Why not show him some Meta Programming now?”

I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the future career of an aspiring programmer, but what the heck? How much damage could it possibly do?

So I explained to Andrew how methods in Ruby aren’t really methods, they are messages and how you can “send” a message to an object. We modified his program to do what he wanted.

tree = OrangeTree.new
command = gets.chomp.to_sym
tree.send(command) if tree.responds_to?(command)

I’m not sure that he completely understood all that, but there it is. Ruby let Andrew do the thing that he naturally wanted to do.