Yeah this is pretty much why I decided I didn't want to write Ruby anymore. You may be right that this is the philosophy of the language, but if it introduces a speed bump or cognitive overhead when trying to understand what a snippet of code is doing (and I contend that "there might not even be a method there responding to your message" is a speed bump), then it's not a good thing, even if it's clever and somehow ideologically pure and interesting. I can appreciate programming languages as art pieces, but when I'm at work I want them to just be a tool.