Ruby's blocks as a way to express a HOF is pretty accessible, and I like that I can switch from "arr.map{|o| ... }" to "arr do |o| ... multiple lines ... end" s

Ruby's blocks as a way to express a HOF is pretty accessible, and I like that I can switch from "arr.map{|o| ... }" to "arr do |o| ... multiple lines ... end" seamlessly, to be terse when I want to be but then be verbose when I need to be. But that's not exclusive to Ruby, Java's lambda syntax behaves similarly. More generally, and more to your point, I think extensive use of blocks/HOFs lends to the "spirit" of Ruby being a lot more functional-style than python, which iirc got lambda support late and they're kind of ugly (I mean, you literally type lambda! almost as bad as go!).