Thanks for your insights. I played around with Ruby on Rails enough to be dangerous, in John Norman's class at Harvard Extension (http://e168f07.7fff.com/about/) last semester. It is fun—my scripting tool of choice for one-off tasks like parsing a text data file. I wish the class got into issues like you are describing, instead of focusing on the Rails bag o' tricks. If it had, it would have been a great class on language design.

One thing that bugs me is that there is no convenient way to iterate through two or more collections at once. I had a problem where I had two lists of numbers, one in a file and one in a database table. I had to generate a pairs from one number from each list. This was just test data, so I didn't need to care what order it worked in or how they were paired, and randomly would have been the best way. Given how easy it is to iterate through one collection, I was bummed when this task actually slowed me down. I ended up with a SQL hack to do the pairing in the database.