Ruby has good support for system scripting as well. Heck, it has great support for system scripting; I've switch from shell scripting to Ruby and never looked b

Ruby has good support for system scripting as well. Heck, it has great support for system scripting; I've switch from shell scripting to Ruby and never looked back since. String manipulation and piping are extremely easy to do in Ruby, in my opinion more so than in Python because of e.g. language support for regular expressions. Python requires regexps to be constructed from strings, unfortunately. Rake is exactly like Make, except better. It retains Make's simplicity while providing all of Make's power in a turing-complete language that allows me to do whatever I want.