Yeah, I know what they do - eg. ||= being a Ruby idiom for 'set if this currently evaluates as false'. The point is that because I don't often program in Ruby,

Yeah, I know what they do - eg. ||= being a Ruby idiom for 'set if this currently evaluates as false'. The point is that because I don't often program in Ruby, it's less readable (for me). Similarly, if you're not used to list comprehensions they'll seem opaque - but I use them all the time, and find them far more readable than equivalent expressions using map/filter. That said, I do find the more "squiggly" languages (Perl, Ruby, C) to be less readable than the equivalent Scheme or Python, and I suspect that it's because there are fewer weird characters, so it's closer to English.