[eropple]

It's interesting that you say all that--because none of that rings true to me. Quite literally none of it. Even the idea of understanding types is foreign to me, because I only think of types as collections of messages that objects respond to and use them only as shorthand for exactly that; like, my yardocs are full of [#to_sym] as a "type" instead. Things like `extend` are trivial to me, and I can explain both their semantic behavior and their implementation in three sentences. I find Ruby fairly consistent and its libraries no more difficult than .NET--and seeing as how because of plenty of bad decisions you can't really trust IntelliSense in the first place (like, say, arrays implementing IList<T> but throwing an exception for Add()), I find myself Googling no less for the documentation in .NET. And much, much less than in Scala, though I am very comfortable in that, too.

I'm curious, though. When you say "Ruby", how much of that was outside of Rails? I don't intend that as an ad-hominem, but rather in the exploration of a theory that I've had for a while. I am wondering if the approach one takes to learning the language and the ecosystem influences how much "magic" there is to Ruby. What you describe sounds familiar from friends and colleagues who learned Rails, and Ruby incidental to it. I only vaguely know Rails at all, I don't use Ruby for web applications beyond a Sinatra server as a dumb API.

(And, as I said, RubyMine has a stop-the-world, click-around debugger, much like Visual Studio. I've only used it once or twice, because the REPL is comfortable to me, but it does exist.)