Comment by hakunin

I think I feel you. However, I think you have conceptually loaded "method" with more meaning. I think a less loaded way to think of the object/method is that the object is the first argument to the method that is called on it. So

    5.times { puts 'hi' }

is equivalent to

    times(5) { puts 'hi' }

which you could expand to

    my_function = -> { puts 'hi' } 
    repeat_times(5, &my_function)

And here is another reason for the disconnect: in a purely functional language repeating a function five times is useless, you're doing something for side effects only. Looping in itself is kind of a wrong (i.e. incomplete) abstraction for functional dev, because you're usually thinking in higher level concepts, such as `reduce`-based transformations. Maybe that's another part of the reason why `5.times { … }` feels off.

After my foray into functional programming, I actually ended up appreciating Ruby more, because it lets you have it both ways: program your computer directly, and harness functional concepts. Since computer hardware is not functional I don't want the extra ceremony and abstraction over it for the sake of purity.

All that said, going back and forth between Ruby and Elixir really conceptually crystallized for me that the method call receiver is basically just the first argument to the method, accessible with the keyword `self` (which in Python is made explicit for example).