It's not really any different to, say, lisp (which is lauded for its intuitive support of macros) and smalltalk (which is what ruby was directly influenced by).

It's not really any different to, say, lisp (which is lauded for its intuitive support of macros) and smalltalk (which is what ruby was directly influenced by). As a dynamic language, Ruby gives you a lot of tools to create fully expressive code. This is just one aspect of it that you can, but don't have to, use.