Contrary to what many have said I think Ruby's popularity started to rise a bit before Rails. It got an earlier bump from being talked about in the 1999 Andrew

Contrary to what many have said I think Ruby's popularity started to rise a bit before Rails. It got an earlier bump from being talked about in the 1999 Andrew Hunt and David Thomas book The Pragmatic Programmer. As for why it beat our Ruby; in those early days Python tended to win the performance comparisons. That led to people using it for more demanding data tasks, which in turn led to more libraries for those sorts of domains. The parallel growth of jobs demanding those capabilities (data analytic and AI), cemented its supremacy. That all said, if I need to hack a script together to automate some development task - in the vein of what Hunt and Thomas described back in 1999, I still reach for Ruby.