[martinp]

Ruby owes much of its popularity to Ruby on Rails. I don't think Ruby would be as popular (or "hip") if it hadn't been for Rails.

Ruby on Rails also appeared around the time webapp development was gaining a lot of momentum, so that might be a part of the reason.

I myself don't find Ruby superior, for me Ruby (on Rails) and Perl solve problems in different domains. Ruby is great for web development. Perl is great for system administration and scripting, and it's preinstalled on most Unix-like systems (although Python has replaced Perl for the most part in my case).