[endorphine]

What does this mean, concretely speaking? Do you mean you can't remember the right syntax when trying to program in it?

I know its syntax is complicated but I never felt this has caused me trouble. I guess writing a parser for it would be extremely hard, but that's another story.

[BiteCode_dev]

The optional parenthesis kills it for me. It makes scanning the code impossible: you have to understand each line context.

[endorphine]

How long do you program in Ruby?

I understand this coming from a newcomer but after a while it felt like second-nature to me. I was curious about parent poster, because they said they are using Ruby for years.

[msbarnett]

How does this make it confusing? What information do you feel () gives you?

You might say:

      foo().bar().baz()

Ah well these are clearly method calls, they have ().

But this is Ruby:

      foo.bar.baz

These are clearly method calls too, because in Ruby there’s nothing else they could possibly be. The ()s don’t actually disambiguate anything. Unlike C or Java or some other languages with some notion of bare access to internal fields, there are always and only method calls.

[batiste]

Yeah, the optional parenthesis is one my biggest complaint with the language.

It just makes things less readable, with not other benefits than making the code look more clever than it is.

[rubyist5eva]

How? I’ve been writing Ruby and Rails for over a decade and I can’t really say it’s ever been a problem for me.