The Beauty of Ruby and Trees

Jefferson Fernandes — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 20:52:59 +0000

There’s something magical about Ruby.

Beyond the frameworks, beyond Rails, beyond technicalities like garbage collection, VM internals, or compilation steps — there’s an aesthetic pleasure in Ruby itself. A beautifully written Ruby codebase reads like poetry: concise, expressive, saying a lot with very little.

To me, it’s almost a literary process — like editing a rough piece of text until you find the perfect words, and suddenly everything flows.
Good Ruby code feels alive. And that’s something you can’t measure purely with benchmarks or performance stats.

When we write Ruby, it might feel like we’re just scripting — but underneath, Ruby does something amazing. Your text is tokenized (lexical analysis) into small building blocks, which are then parsed into an AST — an Abstract Syntax Tree.

I love Trees.
(Probably my favorite data structure ever.) 🌳

The AST is a structured, hierarchical view of your code — showing how your beautiful expressions are actually understood by the interpreter.
Before Ruby 1.8, the AST was interpreted directly. From Ruby 1.8 onward, there’s a compilation step to bytecode, but the AST still plays a central role.

One of the gems that makes this visible (and extremely fun) is syntax_tree. https://github.com/ruby-syntax-tree/syntax_tree

You can pass Ruby code to it and instantly see how it gets mapped into a syntax tree.
It’s fascinating (and addictive) to watch — and it raises so many cool questions:
• Could we build a new code formatter just by analyzing the tree structure?
• Could we reverse-engineer better code patterns by comparing similar ASTs?
• Could we design smarter linters or even alternative parsers?

The possibilities are endless once you start seeing your Ruby through the eyes of a tree.

At the end of the day, Ruby isn’t just about productivity — it’s about craftsmanship.
Writing good Ruby feels like writing beautiful prose.
And understanding how that prose becomes machine-executable magic only makes it even more fascinating.

If you love Ruby, take a look at its Trees. You’ll find an even deeper appreciation for the language.

✨

DEV Community: Jefferson Fernandes

The Beauty of Ruby and Trees