I’ve stuck with Ruby because that’s what we use at ProPublica and it’s been great for app development in Rails. But it’s been gnawing at me how I’m missing out on such great libraries as SciPy, NTLK, Pandas and Scrapy.

I don’t feel the jump from Ruby to Python will be all that difficult (which presents its own disincentive: learn a similar language, or learn a language that can bend my mind, i.e. Lisp?). I’ve already bought a few Python books and have already plunked $30 for Wes McKinney’s (author of pandas) Python for Data Analysis. I think once I’ve spent enough money on something, I’ll realize its time to get ‘er done.