When I moved from PHP to Ruby (and Rails), I discovered how much fun programming can be. Ruby just optimizes for the right thing, Developer happiness.
I find ruby (and rails) to bring the opposite of joy. I find myself frustrated. On the opposite end of magic is Go. I love Go. Tests are just code; no magic needed, not even mocks. Methods behave and usage is consistent. Code is navigable. Types make everything more explicit and easy to follow and more maintainable.
I assert Go leads to org happiness, letting teams work together productively.
For anyone else reading this and considering Ruby I have to say the followings:
1. No, there is no magic in Ruby but there is flexibility and metaprogramming. Everything that appears magic is allowed by Ruby syntax and can be traced down to a few meta programmimg features. It might be hard to get it when you see it first, but please do make sure you understand Ruby and then you will also get the magic.
2. You can choose to use Minitest (which is Rails default testing framework) instead of RSpec and Minitest is Ruby code with few methods for assertion.
3. Mocking is an important part of testing
4. In any programming language and even agnostic of any programming language knowing how to code is different than knowing how to test. The testing framework is just an abstraction that should translate your test cases into executable tests.
I personally can't handle it. It's completely frustrating. Nothings documents what your system is doing, and nobody on the community seems to have an inch of clue about what exactly is happening on their computers. But you can't deny that it works, and works well... unless you need to override something due to a niche use-case.
But somehow, no one complains about having a GC instead of needing to use `malloc`/`free` or `fetch` doing the DNS query automatically.
And that's exactly _why_ I use frameworks and libraries. So I don't have to write low level code, or as one could call it, to use some magic.