Dear all,

I'm pretty new to Ruby and I've discovered that it has a number of nice
ideas such as blocks and mixins. I wonder, however, what features of
Ruby would the experts consider as being the most important ones? Why
does Ruby gain more and more attention nowadays? Is it due to its
ability to combine OO, functional and scripting ideas? Or due to rapid
development of database-backed web applications with Ruby on Rails?

Thanks in advance,
Alexander