Re: The real Ruby vs. Python.

> Are there downsides to this approach for Windows users?

Licensing?  If you are interested in just writing programs to use
internally or for personal use, probably no problems.  But if you want
to resell your app, I'm not sure how the Cygwin license applies to
your code.  Maybe it doesn't affect your code, but the ruby
interpreter that you would have to ****p depends on the Cygwin DLL. 
And to redistribute that, you have to make your source code available
(the way I read the license).  Now is that the source code of the
interpreter or your programs running in the interpreter?  It was gray
enough to make me steer clear of it.

-- 
Justin Rudd
http://seagecko.org/thoughts/