Sam previously worked on Overtone, which is a Clojure library for driving the Supercollider synthesiser. I understand that he decided to create Sonic Pi in Ruby

Sam previously worked on Overtone, which is a Clojure library for driving the Supercollider synthesiser. I understand that he decided to create Sonic Pi in Ruby in order to make it more accessible to beginners. (And Ruby was all the rage back then.) I haven't used Overtone in many years but it looks like it's still going: https://github.com/overtone/overtone https://github.com/overtone/overtone