The use case I'm thinking of is when I'm using my scripting language of choice to write some glue code and I want other people in the organization to be able to

The use case I'm thinking of is when I'm using my scripting language of choice to write some glue code and I want other people in the organization to be able to grok it easily. Perhaps Python is really the better choice for those tasks, but so often these days my choice of scripting language for task X depends on the state of libraries I plan on using. And ruby does have better libraries from many tasks. I agree that if you're writing a medium to large technology stack, you should take it as an assumption only proficient users of the language will hack on it. Finally, I disagree with your assertion that only people with "hardly any familiarity with the language at all" would not know the order of operation difference between && and 'and'. I think the popularity of this story on this site speaks to that.