I'm once again going to give Ruby a go - I've had many fits and spurts with Ruby, but thanks to a random encounter with a serious Ruby developer, I think this time I'll be a full time convert.
In some ways I feel that Ruby is what I love about Perl and what I like about Python. I'm not a fan of Python's white space handling, but I do like how capable and logical it is.
With Perl, there are so many things to love: the flexibility, built-in regular expressions, the libraries, CPAN, and the general community is really amazing.
But let's talk about Ruby some more. I was first disinterested by the amount of hype surrounding Ruby-on-Rails, but I liked some of the descriptions of Ruby. Eventually I gave Ruby-on-Rails a go, but I didn't like how the ORM took care of everything. I actually enjoy getting into the SQL and rummaging around a little!
Another thing which annoyed me about RoR was the javascript library. I'm a jQuery guy, and that's what I'm sticking with.
Which reminds me, Hpricot caught my attention because I read that it's selectors were similar to jQuery's.
Now I think I've found my toolkit: nokogiri and merb. If only I could setup an XSLT merb view - something like mexcess.