Tim Bray explains what is to like about the Ruby programming language:
I’ll jump to the conclusion first. For people like me, who are proficient in Perl and Java, Ruby is remarkably, perhaps irresistibly, attractive. Over the last week I’ve got an unreasonable amount of work done in a ridiculously short period of time, with lots of interruptions, in a language I previously didn’t know. It’s intuitive enough that I’ve often found myself guessing at a syntax or a method or a usage and getting it right first time.
Maybe the single biggest advantage is readability. Once you’ve got over the hump of the block/yield idiom, I find that a chunk of Ruby code shouts its meaning out louder and clearer than any other language. Anything that increases maintainability is a pearl beyond price.
I’ve been programming in C and Java for a quarter-century and I find Ruby easier to read, only a week in. Of course, a language’s culture is often more important than all that technical crap. I’ve found the ruby-talk mailing list to be a fount of wisdom and friendly to ignorant newbies too.
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/24/Ruby
Follow the link to find out “What’s Lame” about Ruby.