Learning Ruby

I’ve been learning some Ruby the past week or so. Some thoughts:

• Arrays seem to be lists.
• Ranges are needed because of eager evaluation.
• I like that anything defined can be changed later, even visibility or constants.
• I haven’t found a good explanation of blocks yet, but they appear to be first-class functions with some kind of iterator functionality grafted on.
• No homoiconic syntax.
• Abbreviated keywords (def). Yuck.
• No exposed class variables is a great idea. Methods only!
• Attribute generators are great for saving time, but is this done through some kind of extensible macro system?
• The + operator seems to do several things, depending on the operands’ types. Is this extensible, or baked in?