"Understanding the Ruby way of doing things is different from understanding Ruby. Understanding when to use meta-templates in C++ is something you only learn by

"Understanding the Ruby way of doing things is different from understanding Ruby. Understanding when to use meta-templates in C++ is something you only learn by reading a lot of templated code." Very true - and that's why truly good programmers will promptly take it on themselves to read as much code in a given language as they can get their mits on after having learned it's basic concepts, syntax, and so on. Precisely because every language comes with a sizeable corpus of lore, best practice, idioms, and other such things that are the closest things programming has to an oral tradition.