But man do I cringe every time I see him do backflips to hack around the warts in Ruby. I don't understand why he spends so much effort trying to work around fundamental problems in Ruby.
Use a better language, or pull an rhickey and make another good language worth using. Reg is obviously smart enough to do it.
Reasons to do backflips:
1. They're fun in their own right.
2. I learn something about the quality of good vs. poor tools by fixing shortcomings in tools.
3. Sometimes the backflip is an exercise intended to get someone who thinks in Ruby to think about things outside of Ruby.
4. Rule 3 applies to Reg as much as his readers :-)
And oh yes, I should be very clear that I am not ready to declare that everyone should be programming in Ruby with anaphora. They are interesting, and I am personally happy with String#to_proc, but beyond that... Hard to say...