I always used the word "magic" to describe Ruby syntax. It was my biggest complaint with it too. RoR took that even further by adding even more magic through a

I always used the word "magic" to describe Ruby syntax. It was my biggest complaint with it too. RoR took that even further by adding even more magic through a framework, where simple functions did HUGE amounts of hidden work. I will say, my favorite feature of Ruby was the question mark in methods convention. For those that don't know, a common convention in Ruby was to put a question mark at the end of any method that returns a boolean. So for example you could write: if product.active? ... DO THIS THING It was fun and I enjoyed it. Behind the scenes it was just a method, but the question mark at the end was always fun to me from a readability standpoint. However, its really not all that different than the pythonic way: if product.is_active(): ... DO THIS THING Something about the question mark felt fun and magical.