[schwabacher]

Does anyone know what they mean by this?:

Ruby on Rails — or Rails, as it’s called for short — has the peculiarity of defining even its most basic operations in libraries. Every addition, every assignment of a particular value to a variable, imports code from a library.

[__david__]

It sounds like someone tried to explain operator overloading and Ruby's message passing system to someone who was not very familiar with coding.

[pmontra]

No idea, and the author didn't have any clue too. Maybe it alludes to Rails being a collection of gems. The part about assignments is hard to figure out, and I'm a Rails developer.