A personality difference then. Reading clever code does nothing for me. I'm much happier digging around hulking layered codebases that may look ugly but do something valuable for the user.

I agree that the cuteness of a programming language is just a matter of taste and habit. I'm not going to pretend my criticism was anything deeper than an expression of why I personally dislike having to work in Ruby.

Reading Ruby code always reminds me a bit of trying to understand how xmonad configs work.

E.g. the Sequel example:

    require 'sequel'

    DB = Sequel.sqlite # memory database, requires sqlite3

    DB.create_table :items do
      primary_key :id
      String :name
      Float :price
    end

    items = DB[:items] # Create a dataset

    # Populate the table
    items.insert(:name => 'abc', :price => rand * 100)
    items.insert(:name => 'def', :price => rand * 100)
    items.insert(:name => 'ghi', :price => rand * 100)

    # Print out the number of records
    puts "Item count: #{items.count}"

    # Print out the average price
    puts "The average price is: #{items.avg(:price)}"

The do...end bits are "blocks" and are the most powerful feature in Ruby, not just because of what they do but also because how they do it. Similarly for other comments.

When I first looked at Rust code it looked weird to me too but once you are familiar with the language a little bit it makes sense. The only thing special about Ruby here is that it allows you to be very terse.

I don't think these need to be at odds with each other. Just because code is useful doesn't mean it needs to be hard to read.

The point being that often the "hulking layered codebase" doesn't need to be.