[petercooper]

You're not wrong, but I also think there are fantastic people in most communities oriented around creative, technical projects. I've just been getting into Python as wow, there are certainly some hyper productive interesting individuals there! HN too, of course ;-)

One thing Rubyists were particularly good at, though, was rapidly adopting new methods of sharing ideas, such as screencasting, git, blogging, Twitter, etc. so a lot of Ruby and Rails ideas spread more quickly than they might have from other communities. Currently the Rust and ML communities seem to have this sort of edge.

[jacquesm]

What strikes in particular about the Ruby community is - in order - a lack of being judgmental (also with respect to other eco-systems) as well as being very welcoming to beginners. That combined with the showing-by-doing attitude has my respect, this is something that should be a standard to live up to.