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Sometimes I run across comments on ruby-talk that IMO are just too good not to quote. Here is a snippet of MenTaL talking about Lisp, Scheme and Ruby on a thread about whether Ruby is good for beginning programmers

People get jittery about things like first-class functions because they're presented as so strange and mystical, but really they aren't. What are Ruby blocks, after all? They're just syntactic sugar for lambdas.

Ruby is a sly little victory for functional programming, actually. I mean, what if you told someone that a language had no for loops, and that instead you had to get by by passing functions to iterator primitives?

"How can I do anything useful without for loops?!" they would say. That's a common objection to Scheme, actually (never mind that Scheme actually does have 'do', which is the same thing). At that point many Scheme advocates start talking about recursion, and people's heads explode.

But then Ruby showed people it was okay.