I appreciate the examples may not be working for you. We'll try to improve them.
However: Some of our programming environment's server infrastructure is built in Ruby (mainly because it has great git support, and we commit all edits to repos). One of Pyret's lead developers spent over a year on a widely-used RoR system. We've given it far more than the old collegiate try. Some of us have lived in it.
If you're happy with Ruby, great! We're not trying to convert you. But there are people who would find the Ruby code we've written "natural" and the resulting behavior thus unnatural.
However: Some of our programming environment's server infrastructure is built in Ruby (mainly because it has great git support, and we commit all edits to repos). One of Pyret's lead developers spent over a year on a widely-used RoR system. We've given it far more than the old collegiate try. Some of us have lived in it.
If you're happy with Ruby, great! We're not trying to convert you. But there are people who would find the Ruby code we've written "natural" and the resulting behavior thus unnatural.
We've had the same conversation with lots of JavaScript and Python users based on our semantics work (http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/gsk-es..., http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pclpk-..., http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pmmwpl...). Some people are appalled, others don't get the point. [This may be correlated with their reaction to Gary Bernhardt's WAT talk.]
But you also don't get partial static type-checking, etc. Again, those are features that don't appeal to you, and that's perfectly cool.