[jneen]

Metaprogramming syntax isn't built in to ruby. Instead, it's really internally consistent and lets you leave out a few tokens, which means it's really easy to write libraries with beautiful interfaces.

The built-in features usually try to solve the general case, rather than focusing on specific use-cases. For example, in python you have iterators, which make it easy to have a block of code that is run multiple times with different bindings. In Ruby, you have block syntax, which solves the more general problem of "let me pass this anonymous block of code to this function", and they built iterators on top of that.