Ruby? Viable?

How does Ruby fare in terms of a means to code distributable applications? I'm new to programming and have been working with Python, but something about Ruby attracts me.

Rubygarden says it will have more overhead than C++, but I don't think I'm ready to learn C++, especially working more with Mac/Linux.

Is there any PyObjC-esque extenstion to Ruby?

No it won't replace java. Java scales. Ruby doesn't. Java has great namespaces. Ruby has hack namespaces (import filename HURRRRR). Ruby lacks the maturity to achieve the kinds of Java does. Ruby even sucks at GUI programming (UNLESS YOU COUNT ROR). Java has libraries which can generate Swing GUIs and AJAX GUIs at the same time with the same code.