It's hard to detect if a terse question is a request for information or a challenge. Back to the subject, Ruby's OO is much closer to Smalltalk's vision. Method

It's hard to detect if a terse question is a request for information or a challenge. Back to the subject, Ruby's OO is much closer to Smalltalk's vision. Method dispatching in Java is essentially dereferencing a function pointer (found by traversing a class hierarchy) and adding a hidden argument (self.) In Ruby, you can override an object's method dispatching mechanism to be whatever you want it to be (although the default behavior is very similar to Java's.) This makes it a lot harder to optimize, (your JIT compiler can't simply inline those calls) but it opens all kinds of interesting meta-programming possibilities.