I actually got into Ruby before Rails hit and was immediately taken by it because it brought some of the best features of Lisp and Smalltalk and Icon into a lan

I actually got into Ruby before Rails hit and was immediately taken by it because it brought some of the best features of Lisp and Smalltalk and Icon into a language with a very practical, unix-friendly implementation. So I could drop in Ruby where I previously might have used Python or Perl. This was much harder to do with Lisp or Smalltalk, for example. But I didn't have a good excuse to really use it at work until Rails came along and completely blew the existing Java frameworks out of the water for productivity.