[innguest]

Disregarding the UAP thing you mentioned, I believe you might be dismissing the complaints of "magic" in Ruby too quickly if you think all it is meant by it is what you said.

In the contexts I usually see, the complaints of magic are regarding Ruby's fondness of Spooky Action at a Distance. I would then argue that Ruby or its frameworks do seem to rely too much on this "magic" that otherwise is condemned by recent literature (and Code Complete).

[dasil003]

I think the discussion is really about Rails, not Ruby. Ruby itself is fairly minimalist and easy to follow. Probably the biggest legitimate complaint about the language design itself is that it mixes functional, procedural, and object-oriented paradigms in a way that makes it hard to fully capture the benefits of any of them unless you really know what you're doing.

Now Rails on the other hand relies on a good deal more magic than say Django, but it's recognized in the community as a tradeoff and it is done carefully. Some of the things that rubyists accept in Rails they would never put in an application or library because it is deemed okay only by massively adopted convention at the framework level, but not generally a good practice.

Then you have libraries like rspec which started out being full of magic but which gradually got refined and cleaned up so that in rspec 3.0 you have zero monkey patches; it's just pure ruby, providing a totally modular set of DSLs that work together nicely and allow for amazingly readable test output.