It had it a lot earlier, and built up a significant library and ecosystem of C modules fast enough to reach critical mass first. This matters because a bigger ecosystem and community creates a feedback loop that generates further resources and adoption. It's the ecosystem that's the game changer.

I'm not a C developer, so for me if the question is, can I call out to a C module that implements capability X, the answer to that is much more likely to be yes for Python than it is for Ruby.