[pilot_pirx]

for simple scripts: doesn't matter

for larger projects: depends on project

[glimcat]

Larger projects: for each, does the code available or the language features make it a substantially smaller project than it would be otherwise? Also, what gives the lowest difficulty to maintain?

[netbyte]

Website scraping, simple websites, execute tasks quickly from the Desktop

[martharotter]

Sites like Scraperwiki work great with Python, PHP and Ruby. Take a look at their examples and see which ones make the most sense to you.

[netbyte]

Thanks

[easonchan42]

both python and ruby is easy to start and powerful, so just pick one you like.

As me, I learn python first as my scripting tool(web scraping, system automate task).

Then I switch to ruby,it have some suger for you to write less code to complete same task.