As someone who has taught several beginners (non-programmers) Ruby, I would say the uptake is good. Teaching at events like RailsGirls, I've had complete beginners start to "get it" and deploy their own websites using Rails and Heroku within a day.

My personal experience has been that it makes a great first language, It's very natural to write, and easy to type. You start with super-short examples that are easily understood, using a bare-bones editor. Explaining blocks and iterators is a challenge of course.

There's quite a lot of approachable and creative content about learning Ruby out there, which makes it helpful for beginners looking to self-study. Books like "Hello Ruby" are great for kids starting from zero, who need more motivation and fun compared to the "For Dummies" or "From Scratch" approaches.

That being said, I agree with your feelings about the language as intended for beginners. However, I tried to teach my 9-year-old daughter Java (using an online course for making Minecraft Mods). And although she was able to get through it, Java is still perplexing. The IDE, strictness and verbosity were overwhelming. Similarly, I tried to teach my nephew Javascript (we made a game together) in a browser. Trying to explain `.this` and dealing with input handling was pretty hard to get through. He didn't take it much further.

Re: learning to code... I believe it's not so much about what language you choose to teach. It's about the quality of the course materials, and how quickly the concepts can be understood. Ruby has a lot going for it there.