I'm not a veteran of a lot of programming languages, but here's a few things that make me choose Ruby. It's so readable.

It's readable enough that I would feel good writing a program in Ruby, printing it out, and going over it with someone who has never used it.

Principle of Least Surprise.  When I see how Ruby implements a feature, I commonly think "oh, that makes sense" and not "that's hard to remember".

Minimal punctuation.  Other languages can be militant about the appropriate use of ( ) ;'s.  That can be frustrating when each attempt to run code has at least one (needless) punctuation error one the first try.

Everything is an object.  That's geek speak for every 'thing' in the code that you can do something to comes with a set of methods for playing with it.  For example, anything in Ruby can have ".to_s" attached to it and it turns into a string (string = letters and words).

Fun and productivity.  Those are the first priorities in Ruby, and that's my main reason for liking it. Code snippets borrowed from Why the Lucky Stiff's Poignant Guide to Ruby, a quirky book that introduces the Ruby programming language with odd stories and cartoons.