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Yesterday I was sitting with a bunch of Smalltalkers listening to them talk about Smalltalk Superpowers. They described rather mundane things like sender sender sender receiver which the receiver of the method that called into this library higher up the stack to fancier things like super super which allows you to skip over the parent classes when calling super to really fancy things like getting the address of an Object.

When Ryan told the Smalltalkers about our superpowers of duck typing, duck raping and monkey patching, the main response was “what’s with all the animal verbing?” These kinds of tricks seem so commonplace to the Smalltalkers that they have no names for them.

Why is it that Rubyists went with “animal verbing” for describing these practices?

PS: One of the things Ruby has that’s rather difficult in Smalltalk is object customization, o = Object.new; def o.my_method() end