Totalle agree, I just googled it: "Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto heavily credits Smalltalk as the deepest structural inspiration behind Ruby’s object model. He combined Smalltalk’s beautiful object-oriented architecture and message-passing system with features from other languages to create a tool designed primarily for developer happiness." Including the closures and collection operations.

"Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people."

(Matz speaking at the LL2 conference some 20+ years ago)