Various Lisps can give it a run for its money, depending on the problem.
Metaprogramming is Lisp's canonical super power. Ruby is going to win out on tasks where it has built in syntax, like matching regular expressions.
But once you get to metaprogramming Lisp macros are going to give Ruby a run for its money.
I will say one of the under appreciated aspects of Ruby is the consistency of its semantics, where everything is message passing very much like Smalltalk.
I am extremely partial to Scheme’s `define-syntax` construct. I remember the first I saw it, I thought it was one of the elegant and amazing things I had ever seen in a programming language, and I kind of got annoyed that it wasn’t something easily available in every language.
I love me some Clojure, and its macros aren’t bad or anything, but I feel Scheme (and Racket) has the most elegant metaprogramming.
Metaprogramming is Lisp's canonical super power. Ruby is going to win out on tasks where it has built in syntax, like matching regular expressions.
But once you get to metaprogramming Lisp macros are going to give Ruby a run for its money.
I will say one of the under appreciated aspects of Ruby is the consistency of its semantics, where everything is message passing very much like Smalltalk.