[jpedrosa]

To take the article in the right light, consider that in Ruby-land, syntax is important, it matters. For example, optional parentheses. Spaces are mostly disregarded unless they aren't in a few cases. Switches that support almost any type, even though when folks play with entire Hashes as keys things can fail to work even more during the 1.8 to 1.9 transition...

Multiple ways to create literal strings so you can save escaping things inside of them or save some other action.

Closures with one block shortcut per method so you can save a little more characters there.

These things encourage the developer to revisit their implementations and cut the redundancies much more.

The p method coupled with the inspect feature that gives you the description of a certain object so you can debug it or at least see its content very easily.

No use comparing Ruby to LISP and Smalltalk in some "power subjectivity"... Ruby is hackish and used by "hackers" alike. It's not perfect of course...

And I liked this article for it put into better words what I wrote in some comments on the original article.