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I am not sure how I feel about a->foo = b->foo, having a magic -> operator for properties.

In theory I actually like syntactic sugar. It can be a pain to learn, but once you do you have more power in your own hands. On the other hand I really hate having > as part of an operator (which bugged me about generics). The peeve? Working with HTML (blog posts, html docs, etc) make it a royal pain. How many entries have you seen that make no sense and then you realise the the generic stuff wasn't escaped. Grr.

I also prefer to think of sending messages to objects. If the message happens to correspond to a property, that is great. a.foo in Ruby could mean many things hidden behind various implementations, and there is no need to call out THIS IS A PROPERTY.

And then of course we like being able to method_missing and more, so a.foo may not even exist yet.