You say that you stay with Ruby because of metaprogramming. Yet I suspect that it is in statically typed languages where we'll see metaprogramming that is both

You say that you stay with Ruby because of metaprogramming. Yet I suspect that it is in statically typed languages where we'll see metaprogramming that is both powerful and principled (legible, understandable, won't eat your laundry). C++'s templates are powerful, though ugly; the C preprocessor seems to be regarded as an inferior form of metaprogramming, to be avoided in newer language designs. On the other hand, there are statically dependently typed languages that collapse the type and value level, letting you make things like type functions. There is also multi-stage programming -- why choose between evaluating code at runtime or compile time when you can choose to evaluate it at compile time, runtime, or any arbitrary stage in between? (Yeah, this one is pretty wonky and I don't know if I've fully gotten the utility yet. But it might actually make for a new kind of dimension of abstraction -- letting you build up multiple layers of interpretation, and inspecting the different layers when you want to investigate what they do. I guess. In any case the motivation is to be able to write high-level code that ultimately gets "compiled" down to efficient, specialized code.) Or maybe dynamic Lisp languages will stay the kings of metaprogramming. But it's still in the same spirit -- macros, which are static metaprogramming constructs.