Ruby inherited the Perl philosophy of having more than one way to do the same thing. I inherited that philosophy from Larry Wall, who is my hero actually. Y. Matsumoto, creator of Ruby.

Matz chose to sacrifice first-class functions just so he could make parentheses optional.

Methods are a fundamental part of Ruby's syntax, but they are not values that Ruby programs can operate on. That is, Ruby's methods are not objects in the way that strings, numbers, and arrays are. From The Ruby Programming Language Book.