Well, Ruby on Rails has as its mantra "Convention over configuration" which naturally lends itself to an experience filled with Rails-isms. I think the language has similar leanings, so you end up with a bunch of Ruby-isms as well. For example methods ending with ! mutate their receiver, and methods ending with ? return booleans. None of this is enforced at a language level but it is still part of standard Ruby practice. You end up with an ecosystem of opinionated software built on an opinionated platform, which makes many people -- myself included -- feel a little bit like an outsider when I read Ruby code that is littered with little idioms.