Thought it worth mentioning this article on [link|http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/4436|Ruby's Present and Future] since Jim Weirich is given kudos for his Rake program:

The second thing that struck me was how easily Jim's pseudocode turned into Ruby. Jim has a few years' experience writing software, and it was a joy to see him describe the way that powerful features could be implemented in relatively little, but extremely lucid, Ruby code. This was just another example of a developer's experience and Ruby's design "just working together."

I still lean to Python for my scripting, though Ruby does have a certain appeal (namely regex handling closer to Perl's and a cleaner OO model).