What are some (concrete) use-cases for metaclasses?

Question

I have a friend who likes to use metaclasses, and regularly offers them as a solution.

I am of the mind that you almost never need to use metaclasses. Why? because I

Answer 1

Metaclasses aren't replacing programming! They're just a trick which can automate or make more elegant some tasks. A good example of this is Pygments syntax highlighting library. It has a class called RegexLexer which lets the user define a set of lexing rules as regular expressions on a class. A metaclass is used to turn the definitions into a useful parser.

They're like salt; it's easy to use too much.