I have been looking into REBOL (http://www.rebol.com/) lately and have found
it to offer some powerful features for networking applications.  Here are
some of its good points:

- Extremely small footprint (200k) and easy installation
- It's been ported to practically every major (and even minor) OS (over 43
as of today)
- Integrated networking API that makes programming most types of internet
apps very easy.
- code writing is extremely compact (examples:
http://www.rebol.com/pre-view.html)
   (more precise feature breakdown here:
http://www.rebol.com/core-info.html)

It seems to me that for speed of coding, especially for networking apps,
REBOL beats Ruby.

I understand that Ruby is more all-purpose than REBOL, but I'd been
interested in opinions from others who have used both languages.  FYI, my
background in Ruby is what I would call beginning/intermediate-level -- I've
done one multi-threaded web app that parsed real-time stock quotes and
stored them in a MySQL database.  I haven't coded anything but the simplest
one-liners in REBOL.

Carl Youngblood