This paraphrased quote was quite ambiguous to me, but the conclusion of having preferred Ruby in the end without further commentary makes it seem like the nice syntax is worth the complications, while I would say those "intuitions" of initial liking/disliking a language because of syntax are completely misleading and should not be trusted.
Also, it's not only about ugly internals, I wrote several RSpec tests that looked like a perfectly reasonable "natural-languigish" expression of what I wanted to, but did not work at all, because of the tricky mechanics underneath happened not to support this particular combination of incantations. In the end you have to understand all the ugly internals to know which of the "nice" calls will work and which not, and I all the time see people shooting themselves in the foot because of not having this understanding, e.g. not wrapping some bit in a lambda in Ruby and having something evaluated at the wrong time etc.
> This paraphrased quote was quite ambiguous to me, but the conclusion of having preferred Ruby in the end without further commentary makes it seem like the nice syntax is worth the complications
It doesn't actually complicate the language to allow stuff like this: it just naturally fell out of having traits and methods, which we needed for other reasons.
Also, it's not only about ugly internals, I wrote several RSpec tests that looked like a perfectly reasonable "natural-languigish" expression of what I wanted to, but did not work at all, because of the tricky mechanics underneath happened not to support this particular combination of incantations. In the end you have to understand all the ugly internals to know which of the "nice" calls will work and which not, and I all the time see people shooting themselves in the foot because of not having this understanding, e.g. not wrapping some bit in a lambda in Ruby and having something evaluated at the wrong time etc.