It's relatively easy to read and doesn't punish you with too many horrible compile errors; kids get impatient with semi colons very quickly.
It generally does what it says it does, particularly when you're just starting and not touching on any of the more advanced features.
It's a real language and you can point to a lot of apps using it and people who've made lots of money doing so. Kids are smart enough to get irritated if you just hand them something that isn't a real thing. My little cousin is mercenary enough that the mention of this being used in a large number of new things that made lots of money was really exciting to him.
They can move onto building an interactive website relatively soon. Lots of the PHP kids learned PHP because of general coolness of doing a website they could share with their friends that was a little bit interactive. Hopefully you agree that Ruby is a better language than PHP.
There seems to be a proportionally higher number of people in the Ruby community who are into helping kids learn to program.
"...and doesn't punish you with too many horrible compile errors"
Yes, it absolutely does. In fact, Ruby is probably the most syntactically complicated language after Perl and C++. Smalltalk has six reserved words and its syntax fits on an index card.
"It's a real language and you can point to a lot of apps using it and people who've made lots of money doing so. Kids are smart enough to get irritated if you just hand them something that isn't a real thing. My little cousin is mercenary enough that the mention of this being used in a large number of new things that made lots of money was really exciting to him."
Smalltalk is a "real thing" and has been used professionally for years in the financial sector and recently has experienced a bit of Renaissance in web apps, and even found use in a YCombinator startup (Auctomatic). Granted, the community isn't as big as Ruby's, but it is quite healthy and continues to grow.
"There seems to be a proportionally higher number of people in the Ruby community who are into helping kids learn to program."
No, there aren't. Squeak _started_ as an educational project, and the Smalltalk community still has a heavy educational bent to it.
OK, we get it. You're a Smalltalk fan and you believe it's the best language for teaching. I don't disagree, and certainly I'm not going to stop you if you decide to teach people Smalltalk.
But why do you have to undermine efforts by others who do valuable work, but using a different language? There's nothing constructive about that.
Because Smalltalk is superior, and Rubyists are ignorant of its superiority, and that ignorance results in inferior reinvention of already-existing wheels.
You may dispute his opinion, and that's fine. But Ruby's lineage descends directly from Smalltalk, so regardless of preference, I think it's unfair to suggest that all Rubyists are totally ignorant of Smalltalk.
Robert Martin, to my knowledge, was never a Smalltalker, and received an enormous amount of flack in the Smalltalk community for making a lot negative, uninformed statements about Smalltalk at that conference. Uncle Bob started, by his own admission, as a Cobol programmer and later transitioned into C++ and Java, where he did the bulk of his work in OO consulting and authoring. He only started to branch out into more "exotic" languages a few years ago.
My bad. When I first watched that video, I thought I specifically remembered Martin talking about the community in an inclusive way. So he's a bad example.
Regardless, I still stand by the original point: I wouldn't make such sweeping generalizations about the ignorance of an entire community of people.
It generally does what it says it does, particularly when you're just starting and not touching on any of the more advanced features.
It's a real language and you can point to a lot of apps using it and people who've made lots of money doing so. Kids are smart enough to get irritated if you just hand them something that isn't a real thing. My little cousin is mercenary enough that the mention of this being used in a large number of new things that made lots of money was really exciting to him.
They can move onto building an interactive website relatively soon. Lots of the PHP kids learned PHP because of general coolness of doing a website they could share with their friends that was a little bit interactive. Hopefully you agree that Ruby is a better language than PHP.
There seems to be a proportionally higher number of people in the Ruby community who are into helping kids learn to program.