That’s certainly a valid perspective.

Another one, “how can we make a powerfully expressive programming language feel malleable, accommodating and pleasant in the hands of experienced devs?” I equally valid.

As someone who writes Ruby I appreciate the language every time I use it. There isn’t another language that has given me such satisfaction - so far. Most accommodate the interpreter / compiler. This one accommodates humans.

Readability is a function of the reader, not the code. It's a dog-whistle that just means "familiarity".

Really, it’s because of the habit of Ruby programs to pass a single options (params, args, config) object in to avoid complex configuration.

Really, what’s needed is separation of concerns, instead of a single “do stuff” function that takes an “everything” argument.

But what’s really wanted is global variables with everything is a single scope.

How does this syntax make code slower and more error-prone? According to the article, it actually saves allocations in common cases.

Ruby in a nutshell.