As a ruby developer who went through a stage of being enamored with meta-programming, I'd argue that it's siren song: enticing, but dangerous and destructive.

As a ruby developer who went through a stage of being enamored with meta-programming, I'd argue that it's siren song: enticing, but dangerous and destructive. It's especially dangerous because it's fun to write -- it scratches the "I'm so clever" itch -- but is a disaster to read, and a disaster to maintain. Aside from just wanting to be creative, the desire to do it usually indicates either a missing core language feature, or a programmer's missing knowledge of how to use core features effectively and idiomatically. Otherwise you'd use the simple core language feature (the one every developer is guaranteed to know how to use already) to achieve your goal. The other reason it's sometimes used is prioritizing terseness over simplicity. That is, you introduce some meta-programming abstraction that saves you some LOC, but at the cost of abstraction overhead. Almost always, you're better off with the reverse priorities.