IMO

Talk about your 180's. RoR has really gotten me into the joy of Ruby, even without using Rails. It's hard to get used to the "everything is an object" idea, because we're so used to all the caveats other languages have. But once you learn to trust Ruby, things just flow. And Mixins just make it all better. For example, on some apps, I needed to be able to skip selections within an Array ("grab every 3 elements"). The below little hack makes that super easy to implement, and use those methods naturally and natively.

class Array   def each_x(x)     (0 .. (length.to_f/x).ceil - 1).collect { |i| yield(self[i*x]) }   end   def every(x)     each_x(x) { |i| i }   end   def collect_x(x)     each_x(x) { |i| yield(i) }   end end