The Power and Perils of Metaprogramming

Metaprogramming is writing code that writes code. When using a third-party class, if you’ve ever said, “It would be really great to have this particular method in the class at hand,” you can use metaprogramming to make that wish come true.

Metaprogramming is not practically approachable for most developers unless the language lends itself for extension using hygienic syntax native to the language. In general, dynamically typed languages, due to their ability to dispatch method calls without rigorous type verification, offer better metaprogramming facilities than statically typed languages.