I'm not a rubyist but it could be that their jaded with the current state of Ruby and constant performance struggles with Rails. Elixir has a similar community

I'm not a rubyist but it could be that their jaded with the current state of Ruby and constant performance struggles with Rails. Elixir has a similar community that's focused on testing, tooling, and quality. However I agree, very little Ruby syntax, just def & end for the most part.