I wrote this article almost a year ago as a tribute to my favorite language at the time. (That title now belongs to Clojure.) It feels like if you want to do scientific computing in Ruby, you're met with obstacles at every turn, but with Python, you're greeted with open arms and tested libraries. That could change (and I'm beginning work on a stats library for Ruby), but it will take time. This was partially a call to action to the Ruby community to start thinking about more than Web protocols and NoSQL databases.

For a more thoughtful comparison, feel free to check out my followup posts.