So I see both Andrew, Nick and Alex J have some thoughts on languages, and of course Rowans post sparked it off... and people talk about beautiful languages, mentioning expressiveness in the same breath. 

Personally I love how expressive Ruby is - I think potentially because I got my first exposure to ruby after reading Why's poignant guide a while back (I see there are new chapters ...oooh) which was quite surreal compared to how I say learnt C++ (from reading the Borland Turbo C++ manual when I was 11, also my first exposure to OOP)...

When I code in ruby I feel like I'm telling stories... I dig that :)

So Alex J mentioned that extension methods let us achieve much of the syntactic sugar that ruby provides (though obviously in ruby's case this isn't so much syntactic sugar as core mechanisms in the language itself) - and of course Lambda expressions are helping too, but does expressive == good 100% of the time?   I don't think I'm qualified to say, but I can't help but feel that a language which is very expressive, isn't necessarily the easiest to manipulate and refactor, so I may not be as productive and it may not feel as fluent to me... I quite liked this resharper horizons post which suggests that tooling support should probably influence future language design - could that requirement possibly fight against an increased level of expressiveness in a language, will compromises need to made, or is nirvana just around the corner?

OK, well I figured this post should at least have some code... I'd feel uneasy otherwise... so how about:

public static class CommonExtensions

{

    public static Action<Action<int>> LoopTo(this int start, int end)

    {

        return new Action<Action<int>>(action => To(start, end).ForEach(i => action(i)));

    }

    public static IEnumerable<int> To(this int start, int end)

    {

        if (end < start)

            for (int i = start; i > end - 1; i--)

                yield return i;

        else

            for (int i = start; i < end + 1; i++)

                yield return i;   

    }

    public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> sequence, Action<T> action)

    {

        foreach (T item in sequence) action(item);

    }

    public static void PrintLine(this object o)

    {

        Console.WriteLine(o);

    }

}

So now we could try and do this....

// ruby

(10..20).each { |i| puts i }

// C#

10.LoopTo(20) ( i => i.PrintLine() );