I've been playing with Ruby a bit recently. The big question: is the language better than python ? For me it comes down to a punchup between 2 killer features: Ruby's blocks vs Python's whitespace-indent magic.

Ruby's smalltalk style blocks are great - they neatly support looping, closures and resource management idioms in one simple powerful construct. Much better than the 3 or 4 python alternatives required to support them (for, with, def etc..).

On the other hand, Ruby's superflous 'end' statements everywhere make me balk. As Tim Bray mentioned on a recent podcast: Python is just right about the whitespace thing. The problem is that I've been spoilt by python's killer indents-seperate-blocks for too long to want to go back now.

Will I convert in the end? Hmm... dunno.