The whole article makes me yearn for the Python "there's just one way to do it" philosophy. It's one thing to have a special-case syntax for brevity or readabil

The whole article makes me yearn for the Python "there's just one way to do it" philosophy. It's one thing to have a special-case syntax for brevity or readability; it's another thing to have several equivalent all-purpose syntaxes. I get that Ruby 1.9 is transitional; hopefully the old syntaxes will be banished in Ruby 2.