As someone who has written C professionally in the past, I agree. IMO this is fairly ugly C. Definitely can't see why someone would consider it to be beautiful.
That said, there are some neat things I've seen in the ruby C code in the past. I thought [1] was pretty clever (this pattern shows up several times in the ruby source) the first time I saw it, since it lets you access the members of the union like `foo->as.thing`, which is fairly pretty IMO.
