I agree! The poignant guide is perfect for having fun in the reading about it part.
And Ruby has a number of other benefits:
* Easy web frameworks if he wants to get into that (Rails, Merb, Sinatra, Camping, etc)
* Definitely fulfills the "beautiful syntax" part
* shoes for really easy GUI apps (that are portable, so he can show it off to his lame windows-using friends)
* Built-in powerful regexps for that pattern matching you expressed love for
* It's generally something that you'll run from command line, helping with the learning about Linux part
* Lots of cool libraries out there
* Object-Oriented, which at least for me was a very easy thing for me to grasp (especially compared to functional, which I'm currently trying to learn)
And Ruby has a number of other benefits:
* Easy web frameworks if he wants to get into that (Rails, Merb, Sinatra, Camping, etc)
* Definitely fulfills the "beautiful syntax" part
* shoes for really easy GUI apps (that are portable, so he can show it off to his lame windows-using friends)
* Built-in powerful regexps for that pattern matching you expressed love for
* It's generally something that you'll run from command line, helping with the learning about Linux part
* Lots of cool libraries out there
* Object-Oriented, which at least for me was a very easy thing for me to grasp (especially compared to functional, which I'm currently trying to learn)
* Awesome