[JohnBooty]

I love Ruby, but I agree with you about disliking that kind of thing.

I've done Ruby since 2014 or so at a few shops. My general anecdotal experience:

- Lone Ruby coders often use a lot of that cutesy/obscure/dense stuff.

- Teams of people writing Ruby, with healthy code review practices, tend to value simple, easy-to-read Ruby.

- A lot of Popular Ruby gems (and projects at aforementioned Ruby shops) have Rubocop-based style guides. Rubocop has some very strict ideas about Ruby coding style. The defaults are mostly quite sane and it's easy to disable/customize the ones you disagree with.

Not making excuses for some of the more florid parts of Ruby's syntax and stdlib, but in practice I do find things are manageable!