when you start to learn a new programming language, you look up what people are doing. ruby let programmers write incomprehensible and unfriendly code. my experience is that it has been a huge turn off for beginners. there was a rush to make popular websites in the rails era, but that ended quickly.
as another example, cpp used to be a cool language to read and write in. they even taught it as first programming language. since then, they added some crazy stuff that made the language very unfriendly when put in the hands of some people. it is now very beginner unfriendly.
the syntax of python will remain a great inspiration for readability if they don't make the same mistakes. it always amazes me to see people from all levels read python the first time and get it.