Interestingly, from my point of view, Obj-C made perfect sense to me when I realized that it was basically Ruby with C syntax. Given the heritage of Ruby and Obj-C, they come out as very similar languages, so I found it a breeze to pick up the other.

The hard part was learning the Cocoa (Touch) frameworks, but I'm not sure a Ruby API would have made that any easier. It's simply a massive amount of information to take in all at once.

For example, in using the RubyMotion beta, after I understood the UIView animation flow, I created a helper method using "yield" to do the actual animation. If I were working in Obj-C, it would've been a lot more work to do the equivalent (and I probably would've just copy-pasted existing code around instead).

    def animate
      UIView.begin_animation  
      yield  
      UIView.commit_animation
    end

    animate do
      # Do something
    end

    void animate(void (^block)(void))
    {
        [UIView beginAnimation];
        block();
        [UIView commitAnimation];
    }

    animate(^ {
        // Do something
    });

Anyway, I don't want to diminish what you've accomplished. It's an awesome achievement regardless of the language you choose.

    def animate(*args)
      UIView.begin_animation
      yield(*args)
      UIView.commit_animation
    end

    animate(myButton, &buttonAnimateBlockFromSomewhereElse)
    animate(myView, myOtherView, &genericAnimateBlockFromSomewhereElseWithTwoArgs)
    animate do
      # Do something locally ignoring args
    end

    [UIView animateWithDuration:1.0f
                         animations:^{
                             self.view.alpha=0.0f; 
                         }];

I think I'll try and write up a demo app to explain what I mean...

I think you are over thinking things.

    void animate(void (^block)(va_list), ...)
    {
        va_list args;
        va_start(args, block);
        block(args);
        va_end(args);
    }

    void (^first)(va_list) = ^(va_list args) {
        NSLog(@"%@", va_arg(args, id));
    };

    void (^second)(va_list) = ^(va_list args) {
        NSLog(@"%@", va_arg(args, id));
        NSLog(@"%@", va_arg(args, id));
    };

    animate(first, @"Hello World");
    animate(second, @"Hello", [[NSNumber alloc] initWithInt:10]);

Yeah, it's actually much, much simpler to do it in Objective-C in this case.

    [UIView animateWithDuration:0.5f animations:^{
        // Do something
    }];

UIView.animateWithDuration(0.5, animations:lambda { //do something })

in RubyMotion. Basically the same.