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Ruby also has a syntax unfamiliar to many. It borrows a lot from Smalltalk, a classic OOP language. And OOP is the best in Ruby. For instance, you can redefine all classes, even the built-in ones. You can customize how every object responds to messages, you can easily send some code to an object or a class to evaluate, etc. Lots of niceties, but Ruby ain't gonna be a performance champion anytime soon.
Python on the other hand has a more C-like syntax but with a lot of its own ugliness like "self." everywhere and __bullshit__. It also has a lot of little language quirks and inconsistencies. For instance, an empty string evaluates to false while a non-empty string evaluates to true so you have to constantly keep that in mind. In Ruby everything just evaluates to true except nil and false.