After his effusive praise for pre-Rails-fever Ruby in his initial foray with it, I've been extremely interested in what he thinks of it now, or how long he stuck with it.
edit: The link for convenience: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/bloggers-block-4-rub...
I have to highly agree with Jeff Atwood's sentiment, in his explanation of why he was OK with using Ruby for Discourse:
http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/
Quoting Yegge:
For the most part, Ruby took Perl's string processing and Unix integration as-is, meaning the syntax is identical, and so right there, before anything else happens, you already have the Best of Perl. And that's a great start, especially if you don't take the Rest of Perl.
But then Matz took the best of list processing from Lisp, and the best of OO from Smalltalk and other languages, and the best of iterators from CLU, and pretty much the best of everything from everyone.
And he somehow made it all work together so well that you don't even notice that it has all that stuff. I learned Ruby faster than any other language, out of maybe 30 or 40 total; it took me about 3 days before I was more comfortable using Ruby than I was in Perl, after eight years of Perl hacking. It's so consistent that you start being able to guess how things will work, and you're right most of the time. It's beautiful. And fun. And practical.