[christophilus]

Explicitness. << This is key. Ruby/Rails just feels really implicit and magical for someone who spent the first 15 years of his career in C++, C#, and JavaScript. (I've only been doing Rails professionally for a year, though, so maybe my opinion will change with more experience.)

[quesera]

That's mostly an effect of Rails. "Convention over configuration" was one of the early mantras, and usually it serves well for such a large API...but sometimes it's just magic.

Ruby itself is a fairly explicit and consistent language. Some of the syntax might seem surprising at first if you haven't bought into the "everything is an object (really)" perspective.

[matt_kantor]

Chef is pretty magical as well. I think it's easy to get carried away with syntax-sugary DSLs at the expense of of straightforwardness in Ruby if you aren't disciplined about simplicity.