Python and Ruby are great because they have pragmatic communities which strive to produce simple and easy-to-use frameworks and libraries. This is also reflecte

Python and Ruby are great because they have pragmatic communities which strive to produce simple and easy-to-use frameworks and libraries. This is also reflected in the languages, which are easy to read and write, and keeps things simple. Look at libs like rails, Django and pyparsing. These all acheive complex tasks in simple manners, while keeping turnaround time to an absolute minimum. Python has an awesome std library which accepts differences in platforms, countrary to the Java API which tried to find the middle ground. This makes python awesome as a scripting language and integration tool. On the negative side, Ruby and Python threading sucks, since they both have global interpreter locks. And they lack static typing.