I seem to have met a lot of rubyists recently searching for better abstractions. Like OP many go to lisps, especially clojure (OP went to chicken scheme, which

I seem to have met a lot of rubyists recently searching for better abstractions. Like OP many go to lisps, especially clojure (OP went to chicken scheme, which i 've never heard of before), and do away with whitespace/precedence/associativity parsing issues. Others look at static typing w/inference and/or better module systems (O'caml, haskell, scala, F# if you already own Vis. Studio). With these, whitespace/precedence/associativity parsing issues can be amplified or mitigated, depending on whose code you're reading, but once you absorb the language's Gestalt or Sprachgefühl they shd go towards mitigation. (Go and erlang are getting mindshare also)