Myrrha provides the coercion framework which is missing to Ruby. Coercions are simply defined as a set of rules for converting values from source to target domains (in an abstract sense). As a typical and useful example, it comes with a coerce() method providing a unique entry point for converting a string to a numeric, a boolean, a date, a time, an URI, and so on.

Alf brings the relational algebra both in Shell and in Ruby. In Shell, because manipulating any relation-like data source should be as straightforward as a one-liner. In Ruby, because I've never understood why programming languages provide data structures like arrays, hashes, sets, trees and graphs but not _relations_... Let's stop the segregation ;-)