I'm a little bit like you, though I had a much deeper tech bakground before I moved on to other things, and got out of touch with hands-on development.

I tried both Ruby and Python a while back, just to dabble.

Here's a summary of what I found:

- Both languages have very similar features technically

- Ruby has a very friendly and helpful community. Sometimes the Ruby material is too... umm... cute for my liking. But overall, nice helpful folks.

- The Python folks are (in my limited experience) rather more snarky and less helpful. I extrapolate based on a very small sample so YMMV, but I have heard others say the same thing. The Python people are more likely to tell you to RTFM, or insist vehemently that some puzzling language quirk is the the right way that things should be done, without actually helping you.

- At that time, I noticed that a lot of Ruby apps suffered from performance problems. Things may have changed now. But people who'd coded up their blog in Ruby would say things like "Oh, that's just my bad coding, it's not Ruby". But there were a lot of people saying things lke that. And they weren't the type of people to write bad code.

- In Python, whitespace (spaces, tabs, new lines) matters. This is irritating to me. And it causes problems when you are trying to do things like cut-and-paste code you found somewhere.

- Ruby was just a heck of a lot more fun to play with. It's hard to say why that is, because really the languages are very similar. But it seems to be a near universal thing that the Ruby folks actually enjoy using the language.

In summary... well there are pros and cons to both, but really it is maybe no more profound a decision than whether you buy Toyota or Honda. I would be comfortable using either if I had to, and probably my choice might be down to which has the best libraries for whatever it is that I want to do.

Ruby; not that I have anything against Python, I just love the Ruby language and community so much, I have no reason to even try it! :-)

Despite being a fulltime Ruby programmer, I'm gonna go the other way and say look at Python. At the core of what they can do, they are both near identical - those ranting about Rails (and I'm one of them) can not forget about Django, which is the Python version.

The one thing I think Python has over Ruby, for beginners, is that Python is whitespace-driven. Hardcore types *hate* that, but a beginner might find it just the ticket for connecting code to brain. Good luck!

I would say that both are good languages to start out on, but I would suggest to start out with Python to just develop good readability habits early. Because whitespace is important, you'll be forced into writing code that co-workers or people that pick up a project after you will be able to easily read.

I've never personally dealt with Ruby, but I do know that with Python there are also a wide variety of webpages and many other types of programs written using it. Again, I've never dealt with Ruby, so I probably shouldn't be giving my opinion, but Python is as good of a place to start as any.