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"I've done Ruby for about 7 years and can tell you that after a while, things fall in place, including (most of) the syntax." I would expect any adroit HN read

• technomancy 15y ago
  As another data point, I had been doing Ruby for five years when I switched to Clojure. After a single year in Clojure, I knew the language much better than I had ever known Ruby and was able to read the source for the compiler itself and spot issues in it. Common Lisp is a lot more complicated than Clojure, but certainly simpler than Ruby. Personally I had a hard time remembering the difference between Procs, blocks, and lambdas in Ruby, though I believe this is partly due to the fact that the differences shifted in minor point releases.
• djacobs 15y ago
  The things that I still don't like about Ruby's syntax & semantics (even though it's my second favorite language): - No keyword arguments - No good syntax for creating pure functions - Metaprogramming seems tacked on - HERE doc manipulation is atrocious - There is no 'fundamental unit' of a Hash (other than a destructured key-value pair), so mapping a function onto hash keys or values is always a call to #reduce or a Hash[array] - Creating a Hash with #reduce is not pretty - Destructuring isn't so sophisticated - Local variables become defined even if they aren't in your current code path - I already mentioned method passing These are all things, by the way, that Clojure does much, much better.