Synopsis

Metaprogramming is not that big of a deal. Yeah, we were super pumped about it at first. We tried to stay sane while reading _why’s book. We had our minds blown by Bill Katz at RailsConf 2006. We were up way past our bedtime twisting define_method. But now things are different. Today we constantly (class « self; self end) and send(method). It’s just a part of life, y’know?

This talk is about Ruby’s parse tree. I’ll introduce it and explain what it is, especially its relation to other languages (since most everyone has one), then dive into the nitty gritty: how you get to it in Ruby, what it looks like, and what you can do with it.The doing being the big part.