I heard of Rails before Ruby, so did a lot of people. That's your answer right there.

Ruby on Rails when it came out was: - A tool with a culture that was optimized for programmer happiness and productivity. - Promoting obviousness via the path of least surprise. - Consistency through well-considered conventions. - Carefully-designed value-based test suites. - Building long-term maintainable apps.

Most of the good thing you hear about ruby are actually coming from Rails.