1) Extremely good developer community/support (gems, the #ruby channel on irc.freenode.net, blogs, books, etc.) Just a shit-ton of smart people. 2) Pure comman

1) Extremely good developer community/support (gems, the #ruby channel on irc.freenode.net, blogs, books, etc.) Just a shit-ton of smart people. 2) Pure command-line interface that works with text files, that makes it work easily with any toolchain. Seems that GNU Smalltalk is the first version which only recently did not require an IDE. 3) All the basic and most useful objects are literals. Enumerators are stupid-easy to use. 4) Much lower learning curve than Smalltalk. 5) Adopts some useful Perlisms into the language mix. 6) A large focus on unit testing, and TDD. And they are very easy to use.