Excellent article, though I had to laugh at the introduction of the if statement just to avoid the appearance of calling the boolean directly, which happens to be exactly how Smalltalk implements its if statements: a direct call to the boolean passing a block as the argument. This approach to programming is how Smalltalk has only a handful of reserved words vs the 80'ish I think Ruby has.
True, however the stated goal here was to replicate the Ruby example more-or-less as-is. Which means building something elegant and then greenspunning cruft on top of it :-)
Your comment highlights how simple things we take for granted as basic ideas (like if statements) may not be as axiomatic as we assume.
