[jonnytran]

This is clearly a misunderstanding of what a first-class function is. If it doesn't meet your criteria in the colloquial sense of "first-class", that's one thing. But in computer science and programming in general, "first-class function" has a very specific meaning [1], and Ruby absolutely meets the criteria.

The other bit of confusion is that the actual syntax in Ruby optimizes for the common case, which is calling methods. Yehuda Katz wrote a good article explaining this [2]. Among other things, it allows you to create very concise DSLs in Ruby that would never be quite as clean in Python.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_function

2: https://yehudakatz.com/2010/02/21/ruby-is-not-a-callable-ori...