Can anyone explain why Ruby is so popular?

It seems to me like a hybrid of python with perl. It does a ton of things and from what I've heard, it's slow as molasses because of all of the metaprogramming syntax that's built in. RubyMotion allows you to build iOS apps in Ruby. It doesn't seem like other languages get the attention that ruby does. It feels like a scripting language but gets the attention of a compiled one, I don't get it. Is it becoming the first programming language that some people learn? It's actually about the only language I don't know (and I know x86 asm, C, PHP, ObjC++, Python, Perl, C#, you name it.) Thanks in advance.