I think that ambiguity is important to the feel of ruby code. It encourages you to think about expressions in terms of their semantic meaning rather than their

I think that ambiguity is important to the feel of ruby code. It encourages you to think about expressions in terms of their semantic meaning rather than their imperative effect^. I think python's @property decorator is a testament to the "nice"-ness of said ambiguity. ^ I realize this can also be dangerous and is the same reason '!' is encouraged as an annotation for methods which have significant side effects.