I've written plenty of Rails code, and I don't know where you find these well-documented libraries that are magically readable. Most Rails libraries are as abysmally documented as any other project.
I guess Lisp'ers might feel similarly.
But it's all relative, everyone else's code is hard to read, at least for the first 15 minutes. By that time, you could have Googled 30 times over looking for the result.
I agree, and that could easily be "everyone's code is hard to read". Sometimes I look at some stuff I wrote a few years back and want to smack the author for writing such crappy code
The point is that it's oftentimes easier to grep the source for something than to track down said thing in google.
SPECIALLY because ruby libs tend to be horribly documented, but most times with simple-ish code to understand.
And, moreover, if you see a library that does too many weird things and you can't follow, it means that probably the code is shit and it's time to look for an alternative :)