I've heard the buzz, but I haven't given Ruby a look until tonight. I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but after I spent a little time with it tonight, there's another language that it "felt" like. I honestly think that it has a VB feel to it. I know that's blasphamous, but I always felt that VB was extremely easy to start to program in. Regardless of VB's shortcommings, it's very easy to hit the ground running with the language. I found the same thing with Ruby.

Just to detail why I thought they felt the same..

1) No sigils (yeah.. I know there's other languages like this)
2) no semi-colons (I guess tilly mentioned that they are sometimes optional?)
3) if foo > 2 instead of if (foo > 2)
4) end statements for conditionals and iteration.

Anyway, I'd say it feels like Perl meets VB.
/me dons his flame retardant suit :)

Rich

p.s. - thanks brother dep for giving me a reason to check it out.