Seems like you're comparing between languages that end up being the default choice due to their low learning curve (Python/Go/Java) and languages chosen because the default choice wasn't good enough (Ruby/Rust/Scala). The latter tends to be much less restrictive or more featureful which necessitates governance by convention/culture/guidelines since its significantly more difficult to be exactly prescriptive over significantly more variance.

For example, most Ruby found in the wild follows some variation found in the style guide: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/ruby-style-guide (same with Scala: https://docs.scala-lang.org/style/ and Rust: https://github.com/rust-dev-tools/fmt-rfcs/blob/master/guide...) and their communities generally care enough to try to enforce it. Most languages have an universally agreeable style guide these days.

I personally find the first set of languages to be more consistent syntactically (typically because they're simpler languages that have auto-formaters) but the latter set of languages are extremely consistent in patterns/ideologies. It seems like you care more about the former and didn't care to learn about the latter (which I'll admit, does present a higher learning curve and tends to be acquired through experience with the community than through a doc).

I find that Rails apps tend to have some of the most consistent styling (within the codebase, and between codebases) of any language/framework out there. There's generally the "Rails" way of doing things, usually whatever Rubocop defaults to.

Also, "perfectly valid" doesn't mean "good", or "best practice", most style rules tend to reason beyond just looking pretty. String literals are slower and use more memory than symbols, and they're harder to grep for (either visually or with grep) in the codebase. More importantly, it's a lot clearer in code what a symbol's intent is, it's an immutable internal identifier, whereas strings should be used for storing data. Strings are mutable, which can be a source of bugs, a fairly trivial example would a developer making a typo and writing `str += 'label'` instead of `str = 'label', using symbols would raise an exception. Same for using %i or %w for arrays of integer or words, it ensures that the contents of the array are of a consistent type (at least at that point). Personally I don't think it should be a strict rule (I've turned the lint rule off on our codebase), but I do use them where appropriate, in particular when defining a constant as an array as it makes it clear to others reading the code what its intent is.

The only real complaint I have about Ruby style is that there's a million ways to work with enumerables, often with subtle differences in behaviour. For example, extracting a value or default from a hash is commonly done with `hash[:val] || 'default'` or `hash.fetch(:val, 'default')`, if the the key exists in the hash, but with a falsey value (nil or false), it will return 'default', but the second will return the falsey value. This can be good or bad depending on your specific use case, but I've come across unexpected behaviour from both versions.

I definitely agree with you about hidden features though. I've spent hours this week reading through different gems' source code because the documentation was lacking, at least it's generally readable code. It's frustratingly common when reading gem docs for me to find `#method(opts={})` as the method signature, with no additional explanation as to what parameters it takes.

I much prefer Ruby having a prescriptive style guide that the majority of developers use, I can look at the source code for any gem or app and immediately be familiar with how it looks, it's a lot less overhead when starting on new codebases. Compare this to C, where there's half a dozen different conventions on where to put your curly braces, or JS, where there's arguments as to whether lines should end with a semicolon.

You're right that a lot of ruby developers are pretentious, especially compared to Java or C# developers. Most Ruby developers are programming/technology enthusiasts, they have a passion and interest in what they do, I spend a fair amount of my spare time programming, or reading about programming. This is especially true for experienced developers (before bootcamps were all teaching Rails), they learned Ruby in their own time, not at university.

On the other hand, a lot of Java/C#/Python devs do it as a job and nothing else, which there's absolutely nothing wrong with, everyone has different hobbies and interests. One of my coworkers was previously a Java developer, and he has no particular interest at all in programming, he would probably be just as happy as an accountant, he spends his spare time painting or with his family.