Agreed. Ruby is not Rails in so many ways, even on philosophical grounds. Rails is full of magic, implicitness, and conventions, which enables a great deal of v

Agreed. Ruby is not Rails in so many ways, even on philosophical grounds. Rails is full of magic, implicitness, and conventions, which enables a great deal of very speedy development but also becomes† a minefield if you steer away from The Way; while plain Ruby is very explicit and in plain sight, there's no magic. It's a blank page, an open field, it's raw material for creative ground. Rack or Minitest for example are very Ruby. RSpec on the other hand is full of Railsy magic, just yesterday testing some threaded stuff I was bit by `let` because it has concurrency consequences, and the magic becomes darkness as you have to look behind the curtain and beat it into submission in roundabout ways that obscure the thing you're actually doing. † or sometimes is a minefield, all by itself, like this nonsense: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/1512cf2ba578282c898b8eb68ac401ea5243b7b5/actionpack/lib/action_controller/metal/live.rb#L261-L263 https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/1512cf2ba578282c898b8eb6...