> blocks -- syntactic support in the language for cleanly passing a single in-line defined lambda/closure object as an argument -- are possibly the thing that are most special to ruby.
Too bad ruby stopped short of doing the trivial obvious thing and just making blocks be regular values. Instead the language is complicated by special syntax and functions for sending and receiving blocks, and bizarrely limited by the inability to do anything with a block literal other than send it.
Blocks were so close to being good. They managed the triple flip with a double twist, but they couldn't stick the landing. It's not quite a faceplant at the end, but it clearly shows how much better they could have been.
Too bad ruby stopped short of doing the trivial obvious thing and just making blocks be regular values. Instead the language is complicated by special syntax and functions for sending and receiving blocks, and bizarrely limited by the inability to do anything with a block literal other than send it.
Blocks were so close to being good. They managed the triple flip with a double twist, but they couldn't stick the landing. It's not quite a faceplant at the end, but it clearly shows how much better they could have been.