I don't think the fights should be vicious, but I think the stakes are fairly high, and even though Ruby and Python are close cousins in the grand scheme of things, they really do represent profoundly different philosophies when you look more closely at the languages.  It would be nice if these differences could always be discussed with civility, of course.<p>I use both Ruby and Python enough to appreciate that both languages generally make important tradeoffs with good intentions, but I don't always agree with the results (in either language).  I also find Javascript often has an interesting relationship to both languages.