That is actually Lisp influence on Smalltalk, and Perl, that eventually influenced Ruby.
> Matz has said as much. He’s described Ruby’s design as starting from a simple Lisp, stripping out macros and s-expressions, then adding an object system, blocks, and Smalltalk-style methods. The features most Rubyists fall in love with aren’t the object-oriented ones. They’re the functional ones, dressed in friendlier clothes.
But yeah, macros and S-expressions make it easier to write your own DSLs.
For better or worse, parenthesis aren't that bad with the proper IDE tooling.
Hell, even without [0], you can at least count the parenthesis by hand in a pinch. I remember seeing lots of crazy-awesome stuff done in AutoLisp by 'non-programmers', versus 'structure as spacing' in Python which really sucks if the Editor was designed to use the system default (probably non-monospaced, cause other products in the industry had dialogs that broke if you switched to a monospaced) font. [1]
[0] - but real talk parenthesis matching in an editor is a lifesaver
[1] - oooooold version of a very popular GIS product.
(Matz speaking at the LL2 conference some 20+ years ago)
Even Ruby's trailing blocks syntax are an homage to Perl's block list subroutines:
# first Ruby example in article
users.select { |u| u.admin? }.map(&:email)
# using Perl's block list
map {$_->email} grep {$_->is_admin} @users;