In terms of getting started:

But both Ruby and RoR have things that the other products lacked when first out: a vocal, convinced and evangelizing community, a low barrier to entry, an amazing product, and a philosophy where the programmers' ease is at the front. The whole thing is just elegant.

That was a comparison with things like Lisp and Smalltalk. Now, I'll admit that Smalltalk has not always been easy to get ahold of. The community has made that easier though - there's Cincom NC, which is free for personal use, and there's the fully open source Squeak. The various other vedors make it easy to get started too. Admittedly, making the jump from files to an image is asking a little more, but we are working on making the intro process simpler.