The Rudimentary Art of Programming & Development, a programming blog, has done a detailed comparison of Ruby and Python and declared them interchangeable. In my far less systematic comparison, that’s how it has seemed to me as well. Glad that’s settled.

Armin Ronacher points out that in some aspects, Ruby is more sensitive to white space than Python. (Via Simon Willison.) What I can say with confidence is that I am more sensitive to white space than Python or Ruby, and I’ll also add that civilized developers adapt to the conventions of the language that they’re using. I guess what I’m saying is that arguments against Python or Ruby based on how they handle white space are fundamentally weak. In the end, they all seem to boil down to, “It doesn’t look enough like C for me to be comfortable.”