In general, Ruby's syntax (or rather, semantics) is ambiguous (you don't know if a statement without parentheses is calling a function or just accessing a value

In general, Ruby's syntax (or rather, semantics) is ambiguous (you don't know if a statement without parentheses is calling a function or just accessing a value). I prefer unambiguous syntax. However, Python's `print` statement is (1) well-known, (2) very useful (for prototyping, debugging, in REPL), and (3) shouldn't in general be present in production code (logging should be used instead). Therefore, omitting parentheses would help ease debugging and exploring (REPL prototyping), while not making code more ambiguous in general. Yes, it's a special case, but `print` is also has very special, very specific use-case.