I consider myself a pretty decent programmer.  I understand a lot of C-like languages even though I can't write most of them.  Python, PHP, Scala, Java, Javascript.. all pretty straight forward.  

Then suddenly, Ruby on Rails.  Now everything is a Ruby app.

Visually, it looks like someone threw python and perl together.  I don't mind python.  I do mind perl.  Those of you who know perl, you're like a wizard or something.  The only people I know who still understand it are those who started programming when UNIX was all the rage.  But today it's makes a partial resurgence, syntactically anyways, in Ruby.  And that's where you've lost me.  Lots of things about the language confuse me.  For example, it seems like there are different kinds of pointers (ok, but using a colon and possibly other things instead of -> and .?), functions are defined using "def" (meh, I like my "function"), loops are weird (object.each do |foo,bar|) and random other things that may or may not actually be part of ruby and are possibly part of RoR but I can't tell the difference like autoload and "=~".

So please, someone explain it.  Also, Jeff Atwood recently declared Ruby "mature" and said something like "it's great that it (ruby) isn't all the rage anymore".. well sorry Mr. Atwood, but everything still appears to be a rails app to me.  People are building the most mundane apps using it, seemingly for no reason other than to build a rails app.  Argh.