Hm. Personally, I think there's a big difference between "there's more than one way to do it" and "there are some extra, esoterically unreadable ways to do it".

Hm. Personally, I think there's a big difference between "there's more than one way to do it" and "there are some extra, esoterically unreadable ways to do it". I definitely don't know enough to be questioning Matz's decisions, but the burden of backwards compatibility means there is a material cost to adding features that end up not getting widely adopted, and if that cost is not accepted by folks like Bozhidar (who must now update Rubocop to recognize this syntax), it gets passed on to the Ruby community in general, who must instead deal with a decaying and fragmented language ecosystem.