Scheme is a small language which achieves expressiveness by allowing you great freedom to push the language into bold new forms.
Ruby (especially with Rails which should almost be considered a separate language) is a big language where simplicity is maintained by informal convention.
Ruby has lots of muddles and messy features, good Ruby code bypasses them.
Ruby was among the first languages I learned, back when there was the possibility of Ruby being a general purpose language and not just Rails. My joy was the result of being able to guess syntax and be right. Nowadays I value reading documentation and IDE level support, so guessing syntax is no longer a joy.
When I saw it, I felt the same way (also using Scheme a lot) and I still feel it is messy. However, what I think might be the reason for it, is that it is difficult to store a lambda in Scheme including its whole environment in an object and send that over the wire somewhere else, on a different machine to run. Perhaps distinguishing between Proc, block and lambda gives Ruby a possibility to treat one of them specially, so that it can do these things easily?
I guess those things are a compromise. Being able to use that concept easily is a joy. The implementation prioritises developer convenience over syntactic purity. It’s a shame we can’t have both, but I accept the trade-off.
While it is not completely impossible to end up (pun intended) with something like this, you usually follow a coding style that avoids it. Kind of like in Ruby.
You have the option to define named methods that yield or to use the short one-parameter syntax where this:
Same argument that I keep on having with people who like
1. gray and darker gray buildings of a tree-less megacity beautiful, with a dash of color
vs
2. those who find small cities/villages mixed with art, trees & colourfully dressed people beautiful.
