Precisely because the language is complicated and less amenable to LR parsing.
Note also that (as I alluded to above) the parsing technique that Tree-sitter uses, "LR parsing", makes some things more difficult to parse than they'd be with another kind of parser. This is a deliberate trade-off, because LR parsing makes certain features of Tree-sitter, like fast re-parsing in response to input changes, much much easier.
There has been, however, discussion about the need to clean up some of the lesser-used language feature, but obviously doing so carries risks.
It is a little terrifying in the sense that I'd not want to write language level tools (eg: syntax highlighter).
But if you have scheme on one end and natural language on the other, ruby leans à bit towards natural language - but in a good way. In some ways ruby isn't that different from Smalltalk - but it has a lot (sometimes I think too many, sometimes not) conveniences.
Parantheses and brackets are largely optional "where it makes sense". Conditionals support postfix, eg these are equivalent:
if should_send?()
send_mail({to: 'u@x.com'})
end
send_mail to: 'u@x.com' if should_send?Everything is kind-of-but-not-really an object, a reference, and a function, all at the same time - which sounds complicated but in my head... turns out to be pretty simple. Everything's just kind of different flavors of the same thing. `attr_accessor` is a good place to see this in action.
The flexibility comes more from the variety of available core language options (procs, blocks, and lambdas) and core libraries (map/each/collect, for example), not from a variety of underlying concepts.