> This is a perfectly cromulent article, but as someone relatively new to Ruby, I don't see the beauty. Perhaps I've spent too much time with the airless asceticism of, say, Scheme
Yes. Ruby is beautiful when you come from PHP or Java or C++. If you come from Python it's meh because it's a very similar language (though the community is different and a number of recipes/best practices are very different) at the syntactic and at the semantic levels, and if you come from Lisps, from Smalltalk, from ML or Haskell, etc… then it's not "meh" it's "ugh", because the language is far more complex less orthogonal and far more full of weird corner-cases than what you come from.
TFAA came to Ruby from Java, so Ruby was like seeing the Sistine Chapel for the first time.
Yes. Ruby is beautiful when you come from PHP or Java or C++. If you come from Python it's meh because it's a very similar language (though the community is different and a number of recipes/best practices are very different) at the syntactic and at the semantic levels, and if you come from Lisps, from Smalltalk, from ML or Haskell, etc… then it's not "meh" it's "ugh", because the language is far more complex less orthogonal and far more full of weird corner-cases than what you come from.
TFAA came to Ruby from Java, so Ruby was like seeing the Sistine Chapel for the first time.