This is a cultural issue. In the Ruby (or Perl) community, if you use obscure language features to do a common task in a single line of code, you will be worshipped as a god. In the Python (or Tcl) community, you will be viewed with suspicion. Not that Python doesn't have one-liners (e.g. comprehensions) - just that everyone agrees which ones and when and how to use them.
I've been working in Ruby for 3 years now, and i can promise you that unclear code is very much not appreciated by not only the people i work with, but all of the open source projects i'm involved with.
It is true that Ruby gives you a lot of rope. People with good design sense appreciate that your code should not be too clever.
"This is a cultural issue. In the Ruby (or Perl) community, if you use obscure language features to do a common task in a single line of code, you will be worshipped as a god."
Just which Ruby community is this? None that I associate with, that's for sure.
To the people who voted the OP up; is it because of your own first-hand experience with other Rubyists? For all I know there are clusters of Ruby coders who encourage obscurantism, but I've not encountered them (though I've been part of debates over just what constitutes "obscure").
You'll get that in a Perl Golf competition but the trend these days it towards much more readable and maintainable code. Which is why we have things like Moose (a better way to do objects).
