Conversely, I think traditional programming seems really hard compared to RoR. I have to think about memory? I have to tell the computer what the variable type is? What are all these funny characters and symbols? I can actually crash the computer with this? What is this compiler thing and all these funny options?

I'm (slowly) trying to re-learn C/C++ after getting decent with Ruby and honestly it just hurts. Few things I do need speed or system access on this level. The verbosity is painful, and you need so much (ugly code) to do so little.