> that “times” is a property over the “5” object

Maybe here is the confusion, ruby is based on message passing, so the `times` is a message you are sending to 5, not a property of it.

I think you’re right, but I also suspect that doesn’t clear up anything for most people as in my experience they generally don’t grok the difference unless they’ve already spent a significant amount of time in something like smalltalk or Objective-C