A lot of Ruby is kind of like the traffic circle. Circles can be a superior intersection of 5 roads (if traffic volume isn't high, you never have to stop), but

A lot of Ruby is kind of like the traffic circle. Circles can be a superior intersection of 5 roads (if traffic volume isn't high, you never have to stop), but they trip up nearly all new drivers. I've found that Ruby is a very right-brain language in the sense that when you analyze it at a low level, things don't seem to make sense. But at a high level, it often does exactly what you'd want. Variable hoisting in 1.9 is the perfect example of this. OP claims to have been a "Rubyist", but it sounds like he's still fighting the system and hasn't embraced it yet. It's like when people who are new to Lisp complain about the parentheses or prefix notation. If you just go with it, down the road you may find that these are some of its best features.