[lusis]

TMTOWTDI.

Ruby, for all the problems it can cause, gives you. More than one way to solve a problem. Yes, it sometimes makes it harder to dive into other's code but I happen to enjoy the expressiveness.

Mind you I love some of the things about python too. Namespacing being one of the primary ones. Another is that, short of advances pythonfu (like django does), I can usually pick up someone else's code and dive right in.

Python has amazing access to mathematical and scientific libraries as mentioned. However with ruby, I would punt to the Java ecosystem via JRuby if I needed that.

It's a lot like design patterns. Some patterns don't fit in all languagea but that's usually a case of the language itself giving you another way. Mixins in ruby are a good example.