[huxley]

What you are seeing is probably more sibling rivalry (or plain old fanboyism) than genuine hatred.

From the Ruby FAQ:

"If you like Perl, you will like Ruby and be right at home with its syntax. If you like Smalltalk, you will like Ruby and be right at home with its semantics. If you like Python, you may or may not be put off by the huge difference in design philosophy between Python and Ruby/Perl."

http://www.rootr.net/rubyfaq-2.html

[huxley]

But to the question of whether a language can be intrinsically "illegible", I'd say that it is easier to write "hard-to-read" code in some languages than others.

The conventions that a language community shares often lead to easier or harder to read code. In the Perl community, clever code which solves a problem is highly valued. In the Python community (as the Python Cookbook famously says) "To describe something as clever is NOT considered a compliment in the Python culture." A Pythonista is more likely to compliment your clean code, to say that it is pythonic.

I don't know enough about Ruby's community to say whether they have their own view about the relative merits of the clever/clean approaches or if they value something else entirely.

[mishmash]

> I don't know enough about Ruby's community to say whether they have their own view about the relative merits of the clever/clean approaches or if they value something else entirely.

Although I think some groups are starting to pick up an anti-clever view of these (the Merb movement probably helped), but you can almost pick any random ruby github project and there will be some custom magic under the hood.

Not saying that's good or bad, just sayin.

[perigrin]

The Perl community has a strong movement of anti-clever, or at least "clever as a last resort" these days. Much of the Modern Perl movement is based upon being solidly engineered over shiny and polished. Take for example Moose's stated policy of prioritizing Correctness over everything else.