Ruby is famous for letting programmers do anything and everything. You can change the language, the syntax is extremely flexible, and there are many ways to do the same thing. This flexibility is great for experienced developers, but how does it work for new programmers? In this talk, Matthew Clark enumerates a number of reasons why Ruby is a good language to learn programming, and points to the features that make Ruby easy to understand and learn. As he says, we can talk about things without getting absorbed in the minutiae of where to put parentheses.