> But the problem there is, you can't simply grep the code for things like this. You could end up with 100s of uses of the identifier and never find the source.
Personally, I see this as the entire point of the original Smalltalk-esque OOP paradigm: an object is a living, mutating black box that responds to messages, where an object's "type" is just "object": a thing with a protocol for sending and receiving arbitrary messages, not a thing with particular messages it is lexically known to respond to.
In other words, an object is like a remote server on the Internet. You can no more introspect an object by looking at the source of the classes it was originally constructed from, than you can introspect a remote web service by reading the source of the frameworks it was based on. The set of messages an object will respond to, and how it will respond to them, is part of the object's state, not part of its definition.
This "absolute encapsulation" forces the producer to publish an API if they want anyone to consume their object/service. This is great! If the API is machine-readable, and the object/service publishes it as a response to a message, an OOP runtime can even perform runtime introspection on the object/service, enabling consumers to configure themselves to speak another object's protocol, to reconfigure when that protocol changes, and even for two objects to negotiate a communications protocol among many options.
People have rediscovered the benefits of black-boxes with published, oft-machine-readable APIs in the last few years, calling the new version of OOP "microservices." It's the same idea: objects with no lexical type beyond "thing that responds to messages encoded in this format", being used as black-box interfaces into libraries which may be running locally or remotely.
This is also, effectively, the definition of a "process" in Erlang: something that will (asynchronously) receive messages if you send them, and might send you a response, or might not, with the interpretation of a given message depending entirely on the process's state. (People who say Erlang is a functional language are looking on the wrong level of abstraction. Processes are objects!)
---
To get back to Ruby, though: imagine an object which serves as a REST client, where the method_missing of that object translates the {method_name, ∗args} into a GET request to an API server, with the method name becoming the path and the arguments becoming query parameters. This is an idiomatic kind of Ruby object, because Ruby is actual-OOP rather than the "classes are types, right?" faux-OOP of static languages.
The messages this REST-client object responds to depend entirely on code running somewhere else that could be modified at any time. There is nothing static analysis tools could do to figure out what this object will or won't respond to. The only way to introspect its operation at all is at runtime.
And yet, I would argue that this implementation of such an object is the best, most 1:1 translation of the concept of "REST client" into a programming language. Errors are propagated from the remote server, through HTTP, into local dynamic-dispatch errors, through the defaults of Ruby's runtime. You're not having to go against the grain, writing a "get" method and then making up all sorts of custom exceptions it can raise. You just make a local object, that stands in for a remote object, and then you interact with it as an object.