Yes, I'll add a few words on RUBY. I saw it referenced a while ago along with hundreds of others. (So much creativity, so little time to learn.)
Recently, it was compared in Infoworld magazine against others for quick AJAX development frameworks and billed as Ruby on Rails. Since the competition was a hundred a seat all the way up to $50,000 to start while Ruby is Open Source, it was a simple choice.
I googled a fabulous tutorial by Chris Pine (as an author, he's smart and doesn't wear your eyes out). It is here: http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/?Chapter=Contents
RUBY appears to have some incredibly strong structural advantages. It is clearly the product of someone with lots of other language experience. I hate language authors who use crazy new conventions like C++'s COUT and CIN. In Assembler, for example, all operands are right to left, except one and that one makes sense to be left to right. If you know Assembler, you know which one I mean. I thought I'd be settling in with Eiffel but after MS gave them the .NET imprimateur, they jacked their language to $5,000 a seat. Too rich for my blood!
A language needs predictability, which shortens the learning curve and increases the success to mistake ratio. Ruby accomplishes that with simple consistent structure and does it without all of the extra syntax parsing characters that many lazy compiler writers require.
AND did I mention it is Open Source?
If that isn't enough, it appears to be a pure OOL. I had to look up a lot of interesting terms (WIKIPEDIA RULES!) to develop a clear understanding of an OOL construct beyond the current C++ debacle. It was well worth it to find out why "Matz" chose single inheritance instead of multiple but allowed so much other power, e.g. blocks and procs can be passed through methods... WOWWWWW!!!
When I finished Chris's tutorial I had the same "Oh boy, here we go feeling." that I had in 1984 when I finished K&R's book on C. Now look where C is. Every Processor, every platform, most languages, most embedded code and most heavy duty apps. Yikes. Imagine the power of C if K&R had envisioned encapsulation. C++ would have never been born.
So how about it? Is Daniweb ready for Ruby?