Ugh. This reminds me of a week or so go when I referred to a hypothetical object "responding to a message" and my coworkers looked at me like I was insane.
They thought I meant an MQ type message, and were completely unfamiliar with the concept of message passing.
I gave an Intro to Ruby class the other day, and made a point of emphasizing the idea of message passing. I also gave a quick intro to `method_missing`.
It pains me when people spend a fair amount of time coding Ruby, and then encounter metaprogamming and dynamic method invocation, and because of their wrong preconceptions they think it's deep, dark, super-genius hackery.
Unfortunately it gets clumsy to always say, "passes the message 'foo'" instead of "calls 'foo'", but if you can make the point early and toss in some reminders along the way the idea may stick.
That is actually the very conference Kay is talking about in the mailing list post, where he "took some pains … to remind everyone … it is not even about classes."
They thought I meant an MQ type message, and were completely unfamiliar with the concept of message passing.