Ruby is currently the computing language I first reach for when I want to implement something. I'm not going to claim it's the greatest language, that's both subjective and depends on what you want to implement. But for me Ruby has a lot of neat features that I like.

Ruby is a scripting language so I can just code and run, there's no compile cycle, no need for declarations to tell the language what a variable is. It's an expressive language and I've got used to using blocks and saying more in less lines of code. So to look for "Error" in a log file one can go:

IO.readlines( "run.log").each do |line|
raise "Error" if /Error/ =~ line
end

Ruby has numerous helpful shortcuts, for example in the code above there's an if after the statement it's guarding. Other shortcuts are omitting the () if calling a method with no arguments, the return value defaulting to the value of the last statement in a method.

One can subtract arrays and get something sensible so for instance:

[1,2,3] - [2] => [1,3]

that is element 2 has been removed from elements 1,2,3.

All in all Ruby is an expressive language with a lot of people contributing libraries to it. But it can be learnt in an afternoon.