I'm referring to things like dynamic find_by_* messages since more people might be familiar with that.

But I don't know why you'd say that. ActiveRecord models are one of the main places you'll see a bunch of `use SomeGem::Thing` that introduce a bunch of magic methods on model instances.

And my point is that we aren't talking about method composition here that you can statically analyze with a bolted-on type system. Ruby's metaprogramming runs so deep that it's a substantially bigger challenge than other dynamically-typed languages.

One clue is that humans even have a hard time with it. The first shock that people have with Ruby is when you see a method or identifier and grep shows up with zero results.

Aside, I can kinda tell that Ruby is entering Perl territory when there are no beginners around to chime in with their gripes.

The magic stuff's awful. Any time you have to dig into a mothballed Rails codebase from a version either older or newer than what you're used to, or with a bunch of Railsy magic gems that aren't in your usual toolkit, it's hell. I'd rather let the computer tell me what stuff is and where it's defined than memorize a bunch of magic prefixes.

I only say that because it seems like low-hanging fruit. If I have a class with a random @ivar that's added inside a random method, there's nothing up-front to check against. An ActiveRecord subclass at least has a database schema to validate against.

I am a beginner. I don’t know enough to gripe, I bet that’s a common feeling among beginners.