"Matz originally created it kind of as a spiritual successor to Perl"
Really?
Matz has called his language "matz-lisp". Yes, he glommed stuff from perl, but from CLU, smalltalk, lisp, and other languages.
I agree that anyone serious about programming needs to learn what happens under the hood, but an advantage of using something that is easy to jump into yet still amazingly powerful is that people get to first see if programming is really what they want to invest time in.
Matz has also said that it was specifically motivated by his frustration with Perl's lousy OO support, leading him to come up with something similar but strongly based around objects. He specifically called it "the next language after Perl," and named the language "Ruby" for the next birthstone after the pearl. When asked how much of Perl made it into Ruby, he said, "A lot. Ruby's class library is an object-oriented reorganization of Perl functionality … I used too much I guess." The language contained a lot of Perlisms early on that fell out of favor as it diverged further. Overall, the language is more evocative of Perl (in its scripting capabilities) and Smalltalk (in its block-passing pervasive OO model) than any Lisp that I know of. I don't doubt Lisp has had some influence, but he definitely had Perl in his sights when he decided to create it.
Really?
Matz has called his language "matz-lisp". Yes, he glommed stuff from perl, but from CLU, smalltalk, lisp, and other languages.
I agree that anyone serious about programming needs to learn what happens under the hood, but an advantage of using something that is easy to jump into yet still amazingly powerful is that people get to first see if programming is really what they want to invest time in.