Ruby, in itself, is an 'okay' (read:basic) scripting language. Not the worst I worked in and -certainly- not the best. But the Rails....
I'd say Ruby is pretty far from "basic". How can a combination of Lisp, Smalltalk and Perl ever be considered "basic"? I'm curious to hear what an advanced scripting language would be. And contrary to what RoR seems to be about, Ruby has a different philosophy when it comes to letting the programmer decide on how they want to solve something.
Well, that particular view of mine may be skewed because I encountered Ruby (as a mere scripting language) only after I spent several years with both Python and Perl.
I certainly didn't hate Ruby as much as I did Perl. I am still of the opinion that the scripting language SHOULD NOT be as terse as possible (e.g. Perl) - since when there is a production issue across several remote servers, the last thing you need to fight with is the syntax of the scripting language.
Those 3 seconds you saved by typing 3 characters less will be heavily overweighed by the time needed to figure out all those $#&@_] special charactersn that Perl uses. Sure you remember them when you write the script. But will you still remember them if you don't use Perl for next 3 months ?
So, perhaps Ruby isn't really easier than Perl - I don't really know - since it didn't seem to introduce a lot of new concepts (in the context of both Python and Perl).
