The curly braces in Ruby do an awful lot of work (blocks, procs, lambdas, hashes, interpolation) and I wonder if part of it is because it helped bring Smalltalk

The curly braces in Ruby do an awful lot of work (blocks, procs, lambdas, hashes, interpolation) and I wonder if part of it is because it helped bring Smalltalk and Lisp-related concepts to people who were mostly familiar with C-style languages. Arguably it was the right call considering where Ruby is now.