I think Ruby was helped by its great tooling (gem, lockfile, bundler), plus it was just advertised/communicated/presented as the next logical step forward, not

I think Ruby was helped by its great tooling (gem, lockfile, bundler), plus it was just advertised/communicated/presented as the next logical step forward, not a major release, no talk about supporting the old release for years, etc. (I don't know about Ruby's LTS policy, but the point is that 1.9 was not special, so it did not instantly made 1.8 "sacred" too.)