Linq came out as part of a set of features that addressed the comforts of languages like Ruby. I don't know if they considered Ruby to be a threat at the time but they put a bunch of marketing power behind the release of linq. The way I understand it, as someone who jumped from C# to Ruby just around the time Linq came out is that it's a DSL for composing higher order functions as well as a library of higher order functions.
I always liked how the C# team took inspiration from other language ecosystems. Usually they do it with a lot more taste than the C++ committee. The suppose the declarative linq syntax gives the compiler some freedom of optimization, but I feel Ruby's do syntax makes higher order functions shine in a way that's only surpassed by functional languages like Haskell or Lisp.
I always liked how the C# team took inspiration from other language ecosystems. Usually they do it with a lot more taste than the C++ committee. The suppose the declarative linq syntax gives the compiler some freedom of optimization, but I feel Ruby's do syntax makes higher order functions shine in a way that's only surpassed by functional languages like Haskell or Lisp.