For all the (little) work I have done with JS I used the same technique of string concatenation, and I don't really see an issue with writing "+ instead of { (r

For all the (little) work I have done with JS I used the same technique of string concatenation, and I don't really see an issue with writing "+ instead of { (respectively +" instead of }). Ruby has a different philosophy than Python, was originally intended to be Perl replacement, and is more open to cryptic shortcuts like this. While in Python, the presumably better format() syntax was a step to actually longer code, character-wise, than old C-style % interpolation. Python simply tries to be more explicit, because it is used in more domains than just text processing; similar arguments can be raised against Python's treatment of regular expressions.