To be honest, at least since Rails, the Ruby community has had a "cultural problem" of denial; Ruby is an academic language designed in academia for academic and theoretical problem sets. It's not really practical in most cases, especially when compared to a language of the same class that was designed for pragmatism and real-world usage, like Python. One could say "PHP was designed for pragmatism" but then they'd have to argue PHP was "designed" in the first place, and not just kind of accidentally snowballed from a hobby into a major platform.

DHH latched on to Ruby via Rails and hyped it up and suddenly Rails became the cool kid on the block, but I don't really feel that's deserved from an engineering standpoint. Rails has always been a lot of sizzle and only a little steak, from ill-conceived and convoluted workflows dressed up as "awesome, because it's better than your PHP site!" and rigidity and inability to adapt to normal needs dressed up as "opinionated design".

DHH is the only notable programmer so thick that he actually asserts mathematical background is not helpful to development, and that you should take writing classes instead, and I think that tells a lot about his general practices and his uninformed attachment to Ruby, which has propagated across to others as 37signals got coverage in our communities and more posers jumped on the bandwagon.