It can be nice to read but try debugging something like this is a horrible experience.

I had 5 years of ruby on rails experience before jobs decided on other Lang's. Its still not terrible persay but it hurts when you have multiple of these "smart" objects doing really silly things and debugging it all.

Well, 365 * 10 certainly doesn't ;-)

I prefer the one on the left because it's evident it doesn't account for leap days, while I'd be questioning whether the one on the right does.

there is a simple fix to account for leap years, just add 10/4 days. /s

Python does have a year option that they are not using. Depending on the application I would use 365 for a year to get a consistent number of days.

In fact, it would never equal 365 * 10 days.

Aaah so a backtick is for strings? WRONG!!! IT EXECUTES THE FUCKING COMMAND!!!

To be fair this is what they do in Perl and shell scripts (and in PHP too), so it's not unexpected behavior in that world.

Does Ruby require the use of [] and {} there? Because those %w/%i/etc things look like custom quoting operators and at least in Perl you can use any delimiter you want: qw(a b c) is a list of strings, but so are qw+a b c+ and qw;a b c;.

By the way, it isn't actually necessary for everything to be an object to make this work. The language just has to define 10.whatever() to be syntactic sugar for whatever(10). Some languages, like Python and Rust, have an explicit self parameter on their methods to help illustrate this.

But yeah, a bunch of languages decided to special-case their objects instead, for whatever reason.

I was on a project a while back that used Ruby, and what I concluded was that cute things like that look good at first glance if you're skim-reading some already-correct code, but are pretty much a net wash in terms of writing or debugging code.

It's not unusual for people to think that code would be better if it scanned like regular English, but the problem is that English is woefully imprecise and doesn't always correlate to what kind of operations get run by the code, and so you still end up having to learn all that syntax and mentally process it like any other programming language anyway, but now you've also got a bunch of false friends tricking you into thinking they do one thing but actually they do another.

(also, the bulk of the text in that python example is the import statement, which is like... ok so what, it's not like Ruby doesn't have its own dependency hell problems)

it works in Ruby on Rails but not in bare-naked Ruby, if that gives you a hint of how the language's architecture makes things easy for you and also might stab you in the back one day.