i've always thought of Ruby as a very clean, elegant, ergonomic language to write tools in (based on a few months of experience working with it a few years ago).

I'm familiar enough with JS that i would primarily use JS now for web stuff, but Ruby is quite a nice language to use, and I wouldn't be surprised if its easier for beginners to learn than JS.

In any case I think that skills in any one of the popular 'big' higher level dynamically typed languages (Ruby, JS, Python) are fairly transferable to the others too.