I was wondering if you had more experience with Ruby than with a statically typed language like Java, and thus did not see the problem with reflection. Now, to

I was wondering if you had more experience with Ruby than with a statically typed language like Java, and thus did not see the problem with reflection. Now, to answer your previous question, about how reflection is bad: * Reflection allows one to dynamically add, remove and modify properties and methods, and that breaks type safety. Compilers are no longer able to prove deterministically that a certain object has certain properties or certain methods, or that certain methods have certain signatures because all those may change at runtime. * That which can be dynamically changed must be dynamically resolved. And dynamic resolution is slower. * It breaks encapsulation. It exposes private APIs and allows immutable objects to be modified. That is why its usage is ugly. A dynamically typed language has much less problems with reflection, since in these languages, dynamic resolution is the norm, and they are not amenable to static analysis anyway.