I wholeheartedly agree. My main gripe is that people insist Ruby is 'easy', because it 'looks just like English'. Yeah, well, it doesn't.

Programming languages are different from normal languages because they have different goals, different users and different requirements. The result in of this forced unification in Rails is something that resembles English, if you squint really hard, but in order to do so, it uses a massive amount of non-intuitive assumptions (sorry: conventions) that I as a programmer somehow should know. This makes debugging unnecessary hard. Also, when developing new features I'm constant guessing whether I should this or that form. The only way to find out is trying things out. This is fun as a hobby, but irritating when you're on the clock.

The idea that a programing language can be unified with a normal language is offensive to me both as a programmer and as a writer. They only benefit is that people who are not programmers can dabble around and still make something useful. Which isn't nothing, but not for someone who programs professionally.