Naive Implementation of Step.js in Ruby

I wrote about step.js here and here, since I thought it was really cool. I've built a naive implementation in Ruby. To demonstrate the usage, imagine the same set of functions that node provides existed in Ruby. So this is how code would be written both in the serial and parallel cases.

Ruby uses self unlike the this in javascript. But self is lexically scoped, whereas this is dynamically scoped. So here I have chosen to have the caller decide the name of the magic variable (cb in the example above) and use instance_exec to make it happen. There's no real advantage to this approach though, since existing references to self will still break.

I call it a naive implementation because I've made assumptions that are true in the node environment, but not necessarily in a random piece of ruby code. Hence, there are some issues. But first, here is the code itself.

So what are the problems?

• The serial implementation has a bug when you want have to a callback function receiving a parameter that is needed by it and the functions further down. Since scopes are nested by default in Javascript or Ruby, the intermediate functions dont pass them through. If you see the first example I wrote, or in the ruby example today, it actually has this bug. File.open provides a file handle meant to be used by writeFile and close. I didn't realize this was a problem until my ruby code broke. The javascript implementation has the same bug, and I don't think it can be fixed.
• The parallel implementation works by incrementing a counter every time someone requests the parallel callback and executes the next function only when the counter is zero. This might work in a node style environment where any callback can execute ONLY after the current code completes executing. So the counter starts decrementing only after it has been incremented completely. Which means that if the IO functions I use came from Event Machine may work. But sync calls masquerading as async will break since they will execute the callback right away. So the counter starts decrementing immediately and the next callback will execute several times. This is the same implementation in the original javascript, but it is not a bug there since the node environment has no sync I/O. One of the reasons node gets more love than Event Machine.
• At the end of it, this is as ugly as the javascript implementation. You have to wrap everything in a lambda call. It will be interesting if we could do better than that.

On a side note, I looked at the implementation of step after I implemented mine in ruby. Tho original implementation chose a more procedural style for the main piece, whereas I chose a more functional style. But it feels as if the procedural is easier to understand. The eyes of everybody I show my code to seem to glaze over the bit where I do a fold over the list of lambdas I get as the second parameter to step. What do you think?

Of course all this goes out the window when I get to the parallel method where I have to maintain state externally. I have no idea how to do that in a more functional style. Any inputs would be cool :).