ruby does have its share of cruft, but it also has some inspired features that make a far bigger difference than you'd think they would. blocks are the biggest

ruby does have its share of cruft, but it also has some inspired features that make a far bigger difference than you'd think they would. blocks are the biggest (specifically, syntactic support for attaching a lexical closure to every method call, which the object can choose to use or not), but here's another cute one: the case statement case object when matcher1; ... when matcher2; ... end performs a method call on the matchers, with the object as an argument, rather than vice versa. so you can say things like case name when "John Smith"; puts "hello again" when / Smith$/; puts "are you related to john?" end the string "John Smith" and the regexp / Smith$/ will each call a different matcher to see if they match your name - a far cleaner design than the string class having to provide matchers for everything you might want to use in a case statement.