Python vs Ruby holy war thread

Last week I learned Python. It's not perfect but it's pretty damn cool.
This week I'm starting on Ruby. I've just encountered blocks and I would approve if someone would answer this: are blocks merely an ugly kludge because the author did not know about lambda expressions, or can they do something lambdas can't?

There's Fixnum and Bignum, and Integer switches between them as necessary, for great justice.