Well with any language you have to teach a little bit of convention to go along with the rules, and the convention on when to use parens in ruby is mostly stand

Well with any language you have to teach a little bit of convention to go along with the rules, and the convention on when to use parens in ruby is mostly standardized from the code I see. But yeah, I'm sure there has to be a better language for learning out there, I just don't personally know it. I originally learned with C++, and I remember the terror that were pointers at first. When I had a class that taught me Scheme, I remember thinking: "hey, I could write this code on paper without even testing it out if I wanted", which was the polar opposite of my C++ experience.