It's not a surprise with attitudes like that! Ruby is popular because it's powerful and expressive in a way that many other environments are not. 'Power' isn't

It's not a surprise with attitudes like that! Ruby is popular because it's powerful and expressive in a way that many other environments are not. 'Power' isn't everything - ability to easily use it is equally important. Hell, it's a direct spiritual descendent of Smalltalk to a greater degree than any other popular language! The performance of Ruby caused by the extensiveness of its dynamism had definitely been one of the downsides of the language, and the fact that newer languages place more emphasis on that while learning from Ruby is great - it's how the field evolves!