This makes copy and paste between files or to/from a repl _really_ annoying. Splice a delimited sequence anywhere and auto-format is categorically better.
You couldn’t round trip Python through Apple Mail either.
To be clear, though Ruby’s massive popularity was entirely due to the advent of Rails.
Ruby is a fantastic language — Smalltalk object model with GC and a usable syntax! — but the English documentation was nonexistent or incomplete — even after the “Pragmatic Programmers” book massively increased the Ruby audience — and the core team was all Japanese, so there wasn’t ever much of a constituency for the core language outside of Japan.
The unfortunate thing is that Rails soured a lot of people on Ruby. (People don’t understand that a lot of what they encounter with Rails is dialect, not the thing itself. Ruby makes it easy to build dialects.)
