And what drew you to it?
I started using Ruby when it was version 1.6. I don’t remember the year, but it would have been around 2001.
I was attending an XP course in Scotts Valley. Before the session started, I was describing to a friend my experiments with Python, and why I preferred it to Java. From across the room, Ron Jeffries called out “Ruby is better!” After the conference ended, my friend and I went to the Computer Literacy (RIP) book store in San Jose and bought the only book they had on Ruby: The now famous Pickaxe book. We read that book while waiting for the plane. I was entranced–I had never encountered a language like it. It was powerful, humane, and introduced me to concepts that blew my socks off. Blocks and procs, and the cavalier manner in which a Ruby program can sling around code to be executed somewhere else… that was heady stuff to a Java programmer (yeah, I know, ananymous classes, but those were anything but cavalier). Regular expressions not as some library, but cooked in. map/reduce. I was drunk with the wonder of it all, and with how easy to use, how friendly a language it was.
It wasn’t puppy love. My infatuation with Ruby is still strong. But that’s where it started.
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You’re a proper old hat then, Wayne 
It’s funny reading how enchanting you found Ruby when you first saw it - some things don’t change eh!? I’m sure people are still as awe-struck now as they were then when they see it for the first time. It still feels like after all this time, there’s still nothing like it - would you agree?
I hope you’ll make MetaRuby one of you regular haunts - I am sure we can all learn a lot from you! I am personally particularly interested in book recommendations (I’ll start another thread in a moment actually!)
I started on JRuby around 0.9.1 or so. I needed a scripting language to embed in a Java application. Ruby was so much more fun that I jumped ship entirely.
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I got introduced to Ruby around 2008 when someone at the R&D dept of the company I was working for built a demo on Rails. As a then C++ programmer, the thing that impressed me most was how I didn’t have to fight the language all the time: no casting, no forward declarations, no figuring out some god-awful template syntax. Also, all the other stuff that @wconrad already mentioned. I started using Ruby more and more ever since then and now I can say I appreciate it even more than I did back then,
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I got a job right after college. One of my friends already worked there. It was a Rails shop, so obviously they used Ruby. This was in 2012. I had only sniffed to Ruby prior to that. I actually found some of my old code the other day. The horror!
Now I do Ruby, Go, Erlang, Elixir, Python, and more… Still 
Ruby the most.
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