If we're necro-replying… Thanks for the detailed reply. Those are all good points. It's worth pointing out that a lot of Ruby's oddities (specifically :symbol

If we're necro-replying… Thanks for the detailed reply. Those are all good points. It's worth pointing out that a lot of Ruby's oddities (specifically :symbols, predicate_functions?, and implicit returns) are stolen from various Lisp dialects— which is also true of a lot of significant semantic/cultural differences between Ruby and Python. So you could argue that the syntax differences are just a surface form of the underlying semantic differences. But that's kind of cheating (except for the implicit returns, which is a straight-up semantic difference). Maybe the better point to draw is that there is a background (Lisp) in which its syntactic quirks make sense. As an expert, the fact that that background is an unusual one is a negative for intuitiveness. But as a beginner, with no backing in Algolesque languages, does it really make that much of a difference? Of course, none of that gets into the plain syntactic quirks— ->(pointy){lambdas}, {|block|syntax}, and so forth. But every language¹ has some of those— good luck making sense of Python decorators when starting out, or for that matter list comprehensions. Or non-paren-enclosed-tuples. Ruby's are used more heavily, but that seems more like a cultural difference than a syntactic difference— generally Python favors readability ahead of 'elegance', and Ruby vice-versa, which extends to making heavier use of special syntactic forms. ¹Except Lisp dialects, ironically! But even there, `(there are ,still some . peculiarities).