Thanks for the comments. As for the language, I have a strong distaste for Perl so anything that strives to emulate its syntax lowers my respect for it. Ruby's syntax is not so bad that I want to gouge my eyes out but I do find it hard to decipher at times (at least harder than it has to be). Yes, I'm sure I'll get used to it but, by contrast, I've only written like two Python scripts in my life and I can probably decipher Python code easier than a Ruby one on first glance.

There are a lot of great things in the language but I feel that it stumbled on syntax. While I can appreciate all the cool things underneath, I still have to read and write the code.

Oh, and does it seem odd that Ruby doesn't have decent built-in Unicode support? Given that the creator is Japanese, you'd think that Unicode would have been a higher priority.