This is not what I would call real code, or what the questioner was after, I feel. It is just mandatory syntactical verbiage to appease the idol of objective programming.
not sure what makes code "real" or not to you, but I used this as a very simple example of "code that writes code" that probably all Ruby users have used, possibly without thinking about what it's doing
and yes, pretty much all code we write is mandatory syntactical verbiage
Fair enough. I should be more precise. I don't think automatic programming is (or should be) just about syntactical translations. Just as nowadays we smile about the fact that the first Fortran compiler was considered to be AI.
Isn't that just syntactic sugar[1]? I cannot see any kind of metaprogramming going on here - unless you can define attr_accessor and similar parts yourself.
This is pretty much the same as @synthesize in Objective-C.
I think a better example of metaprogramming might be the usage of method_missing in Ruby, or, say, __call and __callStatic in PHP, which all allow one to do interesting things with non-existent method invocations.
I'd argue that method_missing isn't metaprogramming at all.
What about ActiveRecord (Rails' default ORM)? That makes great use of code-writing-code to generate a ton of methods on your class all based on db fields.
