alt Hacker NewsI see people waxing poetic over Ruby a lot saying that it's a language "built for the human". The thing is, every language is built for humans (or at least should be) but we tend to have different definitions for what "built for humans" means. Ruby certainly has some clean and expressive syntax, but I personally find it difficult to use because of its dynamic typing (which makes it hard to know what the types are while I'm writing it) and the heavy use of macros and other magic (which does unknown operations without my knowledge and introduces symbols into the scope mysteriously). That said, it clearly works great for some humans, just not for this human (me).
Obviously ruby is bigger than just rails, but rails definitely popularized the idea of magical objects that are automatically syncing state and doing things on your behalf. This is presented by fans as surprising and delightful, rather than surprising and terrifying.
Popular python projects like requests and flask also lean into the idea of providing a programmer interface that is expressive but also maximally brief on the happy path—see especially the context local proxies in Flask (request, session); these look like global module imports, but they're actually request specific despite not being passed into your handlers... eek.
On the other side of things, languages like zig and go feel like a bit of a backlash to this, that no, magic is bad and everything should be explicit, even if it costs us a bit of code to do so.
Rust I think sits at an interesting place in this, because it's all pretty strict and explicit, but all the macro and type system stuff does re-open the door to offering some DSL-like things in a way that's perhaps a bit cleaner than what other languages would have to do to get to the same place programmer interface-wise.