Ruby itself doesn't provide this power. The modules do.
In any event, "more power per line of code" is a terrible metric. According to such logic, the best possible programming tool in the universe would be one that implemented your plan with a single statement: readMyMindAndDoIt.
But, what if a competing programming tool provided the same brevity of expression, but its implementation of readMyMindAndDoIt performed an order of magnitude faster?
I've used both, and actually started using Erlang prior to Ruby. My name is in the 'thanks for previewing it' for the O'Reilly Erlang book for having had a good look through it before it was published.
I'm not making any claims about scientific metrics, I'm talking about what I've seen and the feel I get for both.
Think how much less boilerplate there is for a Ruby class versus an OTP server, just as one example.
Yeah, yeah, apples and oranges, but you can't both say how Erlang is "really object oriented" and then not compare what those "objects" look like in practice.
Also: I mostly say this stuff because I like Erlang and am a bit frustrated at not seeing it go farther than I think it could.
Our stats show that we write a supervisor or a server once in every 7.5 man-months of coding.
Yes, there is a small amount of 'boilerplate' in creating OTP structures, but you are not comparing like-with-like when you compare a Ruby Class to an OTP component.
If you compare a Ruby Class to an Erlang Module - (which is a much better comparison - our stats show 1 new module per man-month) then your boilerplate argument falls completely flat.
In any event, "more power per line of code" is a terrible metric. According to such logic, the best possible programming tool in the universe would be one that implemented your plan with a single statement: readMyMindAndDoIt.
But, what if a competing programming tool provided the same brevity of expression, but its implementation of readMyMindAndDoIt performed an order of magnitude faster?