As a long time ruby enjoyer and now also rust enjoyer, the core syntax and systems of rust are very rubyesque in a lot of ways, you can tell that some of the core contributors liked the language.

yeah ruby API ideas and the _why poignant guide specifically, they were very influential in programming in general. a number of early rust devs came from ruby as well. all original authors of cargo worked on ruby's bundler earlier. etc

Really? What do you think comes from Ruby? Rust mostly seems to be inspired by ML and C++.

Actually I just checked the "official" list and they only list the closure syntax which seems pretty minor:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html