Bambi meets Godzilla 
Steve Yegge wrote this excellent essay about a key cultural difference between the Python community and the Ruby community. To steal his thunder, it boils down to the fact that the Pythonistas often speak of aspects of Python convention in terms of being the right way of doing something. This is rather off-putting to someone who has learned a different way of approaching a problem. It's not a question of whether the Pythonistas are correct in thinking that they are right, but rather that instead of letting the newcomer decide for themself the merits of doing something the Python way, they turn the conversation into an attack on the newcomer.
The Ruby community, on the other hand, tends to be much less dogmatic. We (yes, I consider myself a member of the Ruby community) tend to have experience with several different languages and seem to embrace the basic goodness of diversity. We're quick to show off how Ruby can make it easier to do something that we found particularly tedious in another language, but only if you ask. This, combined with a killer app that demonstrates how the language can solve the same problem much cleaner than other languages, makes Ruby a language that welcomes the newcomer.
I'm still thinking about the social aspect of computer languages. I think it has more relevance than the hard core, rational programming community would like to admit. The secret is, a little bit of psychology can trump a lot of technical excellence. It's a shame that it's taken me this long to realize that.
