Ruby

So why is your opinion so general? Do you consider literally every feature of Ruby to be designed as wrongly as possible, so that no similarity at all is acceptable when making a new language? Even if that's the case, you could still use Ruby as an example of what not to do, and then that counts as "inspiration." Mind you, the result would be pretty crazy. I'd expect the feature list to include "instructions are always executed last to first" and "the syntax has no matching bracket pairs" and the like.

Or maybe you know Ruby only by reputation, and you consider it some kind of poisonous meme whose unbridled ravages can turn a normal human brain into a mnemorrheic shitstorm whose major symptoms include uncanny obsessions with Red Bull and electric guitars. Many hapless code cowboys once dear to you were lost overnight after only the briefest perusal of a book bound in human skin and adorned with an unholy pickaxe, and to this day you dare not utter the R word in more than a whisper for fear you'll invoke the dark lords of the forge and have the skin flayed from your bones.

I really hope it's the latter.

I didn't actually read the OP, so bear with me.

I started using Ruby in 2003, before the hipsters on rails bandwagon. I stopped using it somewhere around 2005 or 2006. The BLOGOSPHERE started filling up with interesting Ruby articles, and while reading them, I realized that Ruby's syntactic shit has led to every Ruby programmer in the world to come up with his own language. Around the same time, I had determined that Ruby was slow as fuck, even for its silly `scripting language' category (I hear this has somewhat changed since then).

Python quickly filled the ecological niche Ruby had been inhabiting in my programming ecosystem. Nowadays, I use Common Lisp even for those things.