I used to code in Ruby before Rails existed and I switched back to Python because they had addressed a lot of the problems with object-oriented and functional programming that made me look for something else. And then there was this wave of arrogance when Rails popped up and it seemed that lots of people with little standard of comparisons made outrageous claims about Ruby. Rails and the Ruby community borrowed a lot of work from Python and other communities but claimed that it was "invented here" and did not give credit to those upon whose shoulders they were standing.

Ruby is overrated. Python is in most ways Ruby's equal, and in some ways a superior community. Groovy, on the JVM, with Grails can do the same sorts of things as Rails and gives access to the whole JVM ecosystem of libraries that is far larger than the GEMs collection. Scala is an important language that more people should use because it guides a developer towards writing cleaner code and using architectural patterns that lead to much more maintainable code.

That said, I would rather see people build things with Ruby rather than with Java or C++, so I am not one of those who would throw Ruby out entirely. If people decide to replace PERL with Ruby, I would applaud that action, even though I believe that Python is a better way to go.

But due to the negative factors in the Ruby community I would not advise anyone to learn Ruby as their first language because of the great risk of becoming a first-language fanboy. Better to start with something else, even PERL, C++ or Java, so that they have some perspective on programming languages.