Scott's got some good comments on the Ruby aesthetic.

I find some of the Ruby idioms to be really interesting. Specifically, the attempt to bring programming language closer to the natural language is an admirable goal. That said, I wonder how well they translate and whether this style is ultimately a help or a hindrance to Ruby coders who don't natively speak English (at the very least, it puts a different slant on the globalization problem).

And I know Matz is Japanese, but it seems like a lot of this comes in the framework/standard libary. I think Ruby has landed in an interesting place -- it has a nice mix of core language features (particularly block closures and extensible types) that enable some nice patterns, but the real trick is in the framework and how it makes use of them to enable the idioms that Scott finds so attractive.

C# 3.0 is getting to the point where you can do some (admittedly not all) of the same things -- extension methods and lambda expressions can be pushed pretty far. I'm interested to see what people will do with them and if some of those aesthetics end up crossing over. What will be really interesting is to see how the overall design of the BCL evolves now that we have these core features at the language layer and a few key features (LINQ, WPF, WF) that tend to really light up with libraries that embrace functional rather than inheritance-based extensibility and composition.