"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").