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.
and yes, pretty much all code we write is mandatory syntactical verbiage