This article is based on a talk I gave at the 2008 RubyConf in Orlando, Florida, entitled “Recovering from Enterprise: how to embrace Ruby’s idioms and say goodbye to bad habits”.

The other day I went to Target with my son. Like most kids, I think, he’s convinced that Target is a toy store, which just happens to sell towels and shoes and cleaning supplies, too, so in his eyes it’d be criminal to not walk through the bare handful of toy aisles.