I love Ruby, it's just such a nice place to live. This article at O'Reilly Net talks about Ruby as an academic language. I think it's a great choice:
- It can get students writing useful programs quickly
- It introduces students to Object Oriented programming in a really logical way. Way better than C++ or Java for teaching OO
- It can gently introduce students to Functional Programming, which could really help them develop better software
- It includes Tests, which are just so fundamentally important. I think Tests built right in, like Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) are the most important programming idea in the last 5 years, and can transform the way you program
