My experience has been that Ruby allows to achieve what you need at your pace, and learn what you need as you go.
When you start to learn C, you really have a couple of technical points to understand before being able to print a simple hello world.
Sidenote but I'm thankful to Matz for creating a language that makes disciplined programmers able to create highly maintainable code bases, too (I find it's easier than in C# or Java at least in my experience).
"Sidenote but I'm thankful to Matz for creating a language that makes disciplined programmers able to create highly maintainable code bases"
I agree with that. The "disciplined programmers" part is, however, the reason that I think that Ruby should be a reward for programmers who make it through C programming classes first.
Ruby's a great language, and a lot of fun to program with, but the same characteristics that make it an enjoyable language to use also make it possible for undisciplined programmers to get things done.
When you start to learn C, you really have a couple of technical points to understand before being able to print a simple hello world.
Sidenote but I'm thankful to Matz for creating a language that makes disciplined programmers able to create highly maintainable code bases, too (I find it's easier than in C# or Java at least in my experience).