I would say more broadly the innovation was two fold: 1) to make these features available in a syntactic form that would seem more familiar to programmers and 2) the powerful insight that when combined with Smalltalk style meta programming you can have a language that on the surface seems very conventional but underneath is just as powerful as Smalltalk or Lisp.

Although I would say he didn’t get 100% there although that this point Ruby isn’t too far from that.

These are ideas that I think are worth trying to take even further. In fact, I’ve been experimenting with that.

fwiw "Efficient Implementation of Smalltalk Block Returns"

https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/things/smalltalk-things/effici...