The thing that the original article(by atwood) seems to be complaining about is not actually metaprogramming. It seems more like the standard gripe that functio

The thing that the original article(by atwood) seems to be complaining about is not actually metaprogramming. It seems more like the standard gripe that functional programmers have about state, even though it is not phrased that way. He is objecting to dynamically changing some of the methods in the string class leading to subtle bugs as some code is written assuming the old string class and some using the new string class. Pheraps just explicitly define a separate custom-string class, or as he points out use mixins.