I think the hallmark of any good teaching language is the ability to get up-and-running quickly, and Ruby (and PHP and Perl and Python and scripted languages in general) have that over Java, C++, and others.
But I think it's important to compare and contrast languages for just that reason, so that when moving to a language which requires a lot of preparation before you can even echo "Hello, World", the student doesn't get frustrated.
But I think it's important to compare and contrast languages for just that reason, so that when moving to a language which requires a lot of preparation before you can even echo "Hello, World", the student doesn't get frustrated.