On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Marc Heiler <shevegen@[...].org>  wrote:
>  I was about to comment on something but when i read this:
> > What does Ruby gain from its syntactic quirks
>  I could not really continue.
>  It reminds me of the terminology "monkeypatching".
>  I dont really want to comment towards derogative terminology. (To me, a
>  quirk implies something derogative...

My usage of the term "quirk" was never intended to be derogatory.  To
me, a "quirk" is simply an idiosyncrasy: something unique to a
particular group or idiomatic context.  For example: No matter which
way you slice it, "arr.each { |item| item.foo }" and its underlying
implementation is unique to Ruby, and I'm really interested to see
why, specifically, Matz decided to do it that way, for that and other
decisions.  Maybe a different spin on my question could be, "What
problems did Ruby solve, as a new language?"

 - M