> Ruby, to me at least, seems objectively more difficult to understand intuitively when scanning the code.

Reading Ruby code always reminds me a bit of trying to understand how xmonad configs work.

E.g. the Sequel example:

    require 'sequel'

Nitpick: IMHO import-operators should operate on names not strings, because they essentially are equivalent to "foo := $magic".

    DB = Sequel.sqlite # memory database, requires sqlite3

Why isn't this a function call? How would I pass options, e.g. the file name here? Why is it Sequel. here, but "sequel" above? Does "require" dump a bunch of unspecified names in my namespace?

    DB.create_table :items do
      primary_key :id
      String :name
      Float :price
    end

What kind of construct is this? Where do all these names ("primary_key", "String", "Float") come from? They were never imported. Is this like ":name => foo" but because that doesn't nest we now have ":name do ... end" for nesting dictionaries?

    items = DB[:items] # Create a dataset

?

    # Populate the table
    items.insert(:name => 'abc', :price => rand * 100)
    items.insert(:name => 'def', :price => rand * 100)
    items.insert(:name => 'ghi', :price => rand * 100)

I guess ":name => foo" is some sort of keyword argument.

    # Print out the number of records
    puts "Item count: #{items.count}"

    # Print out the average price
    puts "The average price is: #{items.avg(:price)}"

If ":name => foo" is some sort of keyword argument, then what value has "price" here?