Matz directly credits Lisp (through Emacs Lisp) as influence in the design of Ruby and its runtime, with Smalltalk influence on the language itself, and IIRC Pe

Matz directly credits Lisp (through Emacs Lisp) as influence in the design of Ruby and its runtime, with Smalltalk influence on the language itself, and IIRC Perl as "what was popular and we tried to replace"