I am not really familiar enough with Python to say for sure but from what I know, XML libraries are probably superior on the Python side - in fact most "enterprise" interoperability libraries are probably better, or at least more mature. The situation on the Ruby side is improving rapidly, but given its history, yeah, many things like that are probably a little behind. Ask again in a couple of years!

The flipside of this, though, is that everything in Ruby is currently in a state of flux. The "winner" of the libraries is constantly changing and the rate of progress is actually quite staggering. There's excitement, momentum and willingness to embrace new ideas in the Ruby community that seems to exceed Python's.

So yeah. If you want stable, mature libraries that you can rely on for the next 5 years, Ruby is probably not the choice for you right now. If you want, however, to constantly live on "the edge" and see, say, 5 competing interfaces to the latest DB come out within days of its alpha release then Ruby's the go.

This is all fairly minor though - they're both great languages with great communities, I don't get all this "A vs. B" nonsense. There are certain libraries in Python that I wish were available in Ruby. There are certain libraries I like in Ruby that I know are not available in Python. My advice to a novice would be to choose the one whose syntax they prefer.