Personally, I still haven't really found a better tool for little one-off throwaway scripts than Ruby. Python's always been verbose for me and lacks the awk heritage that makes text processing tasks so easy. Node forces me to deal with async I/O. Shell has annoying quoting rules.

I don't feel strongly about any of this and if another language is your favorite for small one-offs, that's great. Ruby works well for me though, and I hope it sticks around.