> I don't really encounter many folks making the claim that Ruby is a functional language.
Ruby is a multiparadigm language, and functional is one of the important paradigms it supports. A rather popular essay on Ruby from nearly a decade ago (surprising for me to discover that it was that long ago!) was "Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP" [1]
Its true that recently much of the recent focus on functional languages has been on statically-typed and/or pure functional languages, which neither Ruby nor Lisp is...
Ruby is a multiparadigm language, and functional is one of the important paradigms it supports. A rather popular essay on Ruby from nearly a decade ago (surprising for me to discover that it was that long ago!) was "Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP" [1]
Its true that recently much of the recent focus on functional languages has been on statically-typed and/or pure functional languages, which neither Ruby nor Lisp is...
[1] http://www.randomhacks.net/2005/12/03/why-ruby-is-an-accepta...