[hxegon]

I have about 6 years of ruby experience and if you're saying that ruby has "easily predictable syntax"...

You really should try lisp. I liked clojure a lot coming from ruby because it has a lot of nice ergonomics other lisps lack. I think youd get a lot out of it.

[shadowgovt]

Ruby and LISP have a lot of overlap. To my money, LISP is a little more predictable because the polymorphic nature of the language itself is always in your face; you know that you're always staring at a list, and you have no idea without context whether that list is being evaluated at runtime, is literal, or is the body of a macro.

Ruby has all those features but (to my personal taste) makes it less obvious that things are that wilding.

(But in both languages I get to play the game "Where the hell is this function or variable defined?" way more often than I want to. There are some advantages to languages that have a strict rule about modular encapsulation and requiring almost everything into the current context... With Rails, in particular, I find it hard to understand other people's code because I never know if a given symbol was defined in another file in the codebase, defined in a library, or magicked into being by doing string transformations on a data source... In C++, I have to rely on grep a lot to find definitions, but in Ruby on Rails not even grep is likely to find me the answer I want! Common LISP is similarly flexible with a lot of common library functions that magick new symbols into existence, but the codebases I work on in LISP aren't as large as the Ruby on Rails codebases I touch, so it bites me less).

[speedbird]

Go back to the source, use Smalltalk in a nice environment like VisualWorks and get all that built in :-)