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Alex Payne did a much better job expressing this that I could in my slightly addled state:

I enjoy programming in Ruby, but it doesn’t have the crisp simplicity that I prefer. Syntactical shortcuts inherited from Perl combined with upteen different ways to write a given expression make the language extremely flexible, but also extremely complex. It’s possible to write clean, minimal Ruby, but such code rarely takes full advantage of the language. Idiomatic Ruby is powerful but complicated. While Ruby programs are often shorter than their equivalents in other languages, line density frequently offsets length for rapid comprehension.

That’s always something I’ve noticed with Ruby - that it borrows too many “magic symbols” from Perl for my liking. I strongly dislike idiomatic code because reading it is too much like parsing hieroglyphics. To some extent you’re gonna get that with any computer language, and a lot of it is dependent on what you’re used to syntactically, but I do think there are tendencies for some languages to be more or less “readable.” PHP does a pretty decent job of it; I think Python is even better in this regard, and probably why I dig the language a lot.