People don't like to say it to your face, but Python is often derided and considered to be pretty silly. Oh, and its syntax is like Lego. Neat at first until you want something like a multiline lambda.
People don't like to say it to your face, but C is often derided and considered to be pretty silly. Oh, and its syntax is like Lego. Neat at first until you want to understand what something is a pointer to.
It used to be the assumption that there was a direct tradeoff between performance and convenience/productivity of a programming language. I think newer languages are showing that this doesn't have to be true, at least not to nearly the same degree.
Maybe if there were competing implementations to ruby, it would still be popular outside the rails community. But it seems as if the vast majority of ruby core developers work on the mainline implementation, or forks thereof.