You didn't address the point of the article: Ruby is optimized for the common case. Yes, I too like the idea of how pure Python's approach is, but look at your

You didn't address the point of the article: Ruby is optimized for the common case. Yes, I too like the idea of how pure Python's approach is, but look at your code; you are mostly writing methods. They should be primitive. Ruby gets a little messy, but it does it for you, so you can write cleaner code. As for those four types, methods are one of the central pillars of Ruby, they are more than functions and they deserve their own type. Blocks are not a type, that's a common confusion. Lambdas are just what you'd expect, and more powerful than Python lambdas. Procs are there to support block syntax, again for convenience in the common use case, because if you used lambdas for blocks you wouldn't be able to return out of a method while inside a block such as a loop.