There are more people in the #haskell channel on Freenode IRC than #clojure, #scala, #lisp, #racket, or #ruby.

didn't even know that.

BTW the people on #haskell are quite active, and nice :)

(maybe a pointless counter-example, I once went onto #ruby, and asked about an easy way to make a function name refer to a function( to be able to do things like list map f easily, without the superflous do |x| f x end ), and I got yelled at because I was trying to write "non-ruby code".

The Ruby community is very close-minded. I've been a victim of that behavior in #ruby as well. If you asked an equivalent question on #ror (the Rails channel) you'd get more than yelled at - no one would take you seriously from that point on.

To answer your question, because methods aren't first-class in Ruby, you can't pass them around the way you want to. I've decided I don't want my languages telling me what I can or can't do when I know what I want to do is a simple matter of making more types of pointers first-class.

You can pass Ruby methods around; the syntax is just ugly, and it isn't really used:

    def call_on_two fn
      fn.call 2
    end

    call_on_two 1.method(:+)      #=> 3

The problem with [1, 2, 3].map(:function_name) is just that map requires a block, and not a method or proc.

A method like that could be easily enough created, though it'd be kind of ugly:

    module Enumerable
      def map_fn fn
        map { |i| method(fn).call i }
      end
    end

    def foo num
      num + 2
    end

    [1, 2, 3].map_fn :foo #=> [3, 4, 5]

I don't know why there isn't an easy way to freely convert between methods, procs, and blocks; it's definitely something the language is missing.

I figured that out later on, that I should probably not think of ruby as functional ( my brain hardwires no parentheses languages to functional languages I think). After which the experience becomes slightly less frustrating

>There are more people in the #haskell channel on Freenode IRC than #clojure, #scala, #lisp, #racket, or #ruby.

Which doesn't mean a thing. How many of them are employed developers working in the language, as opposed to dabblers?

Very few professional developers I've known hang on IRC. It's 2014 already.