No, you understood me right. If you make it too easy to fragment the language the eyeballs on any subsurface get stretched mighty thin.
This might actually be one reason lisp has fragmented: it's too easy to implement and fork, and so it has forked again and again since the day it was implemented. Suddenly ruby's brittle, hacky, error-prone parser becomes an asset rather than a liability. It's too hard to change (all those cases where you can drop parens or curlies at the end of a function call), and it keeps the language from forking.
