In this case, hideous because of the overloading of =. But in general it's just an ugly inconsistent mess of a language. It can't decide if it's supposed to be

In this case, hideous because of the overloading of =. But in general it's just an ugly inconsistent mess of a language. It can't decide if it's supposed to be expressive and read like English (begin, end, rescue, unless, etc) or needlessly terse by omitting random vowels (elsif, strftime, uniq). And then there's the utter mess that large codebases get into with metaprogramming.