In the brief time I did ruby hacking, variable issues were much worse, and in fact the reason I dropped using the language altogether. It seemed nearly impossible for me to track down how a variable entered my module's scope. And the encouraging monkeypatching ("opening up a class") thing means you have no idea how even base object methods are going to work, because it's highly likely that another library changed them.

But, go for it if you're interested! What do I know? :)