In the last 5-7 years I've had to go in other directions. Clojure, Python, Java, even back to C and taking a look at Rust and Zig. I'm now in a role where I don't code so much, but I can see Ruby's problems - performance, the surprises, the fact it allows idiots to do idiotic things (nobody under the age of 40 should be legally allowed to monkey patch a base class or engage in meta programming).
And yet when I want to do something for me, for fun, perhaps advent of code, or a quick mock-up of something that's rolling around in my head, I reach for Ruby. Not elixir which has better runtimes, or C or Zig or Rust which has better performance, not something statically typed which leads to fewer bugs, not Python which has a huge data science community to it...
A few weeks ago I was listening to the DHH episode of the Lex Fridman podcast [0], where DHH talks about Ruby as a "luxury programming language". This matches my own experience.
When I need something to be fast, it's either because I'm dealing with a low-latency problem (and some of my side projects are very latency sensitive - 5ms can make the difference between success and failure), or because I can't afford the luxury of Ruby and Rails and the developer ergonomics.
Ruby makes things fun for the programmer. That's the point. It's beautiful to work with, even if it doesn't do all the things that all the coding books and blogs insist I should be ashamed to not have in my language.
I was slightly embarrassed to be a Ruby and RoR advocate for a while because of the brogrammer BS that emerged around both ecosystems in the 2010s. I then became very embarrassed because it wasn't as cool as a systems language like Rust or Go, or as intellectually deep as Haskell, or as hot on the ML bandwagon as Python.
But I think I don't care anymore. I'm just going to accept it for what it is, and lean into. Life's too short for "shoulds" - I'm just going to like what I like. And I like Ruby.