Type introspection

Type introspection is when you ask an object, "What kind of thing are you?" just like you might ask a person what they do for a job. Then the object tells you what it is, and what properties or abilities it has.

Imagine you have a toy box. You can take out a toy and ask it, "What kind of toy are you?" Sometimes it might say, "I'm a car," or "I'm a stuffed animal." Once you know what kind of toy it is, you can play with it in a certain way. If it's a car, you might pretend to drive it around the room, but if it's a stuffed animal, you might give it a hug.

In computer programming, functions and objects can also have types. You can use type introspection to figure out what kind of thing they are, and what you can do with them. It's just like figuring out what you can do with a toy once you know what it is.

For example, you might have a function that adds two numbers together. You can ask the function, "What kind of function are you?" and it might say, "I'm an addition function." Then you know that if you give it two numbers, it will add them together for you.

Type introspection is a really useful tool in computer programming because it helps you understand what you can do with different objects and functions. It's kind of like a superpower for programmers, because they can understand and manipulate all kinds of different objects and functions.