[rtpg]

I definitely feel this effect, in that some languages are definitely about playing with the language. This can be helpful and make things more productive, but is definitely felt more in some languages than others. It's almost whimsy.

Haskell has this, Rust has this (where you're enticed to imagine everything as moving in and out of memory with a certain flow), C++ has this (trying to imagine how you can take advantage of as many features as possible to get beyond C's expressive ceiling).

Scala definitely has this, if only by making it impossible to write more than 2 lines of Scala without having to make 4 decisions around language feature usage.

You can see attraction to this kind of whimsy in the community.

I would definitely place Ruby in the whimsical language category though. There's way too much fun being had with mixins in that ecosystem for it to be considered a "straightforward" language.