- Ruby and Scala both provide object oriented and functional programming capabilities but Scala aims to have better performance than Ruby while providing less ceremony than Java. - Both languages have vibrant communities and encourage testing, but Scala emphasizes letting the compiler do more work and provides concurrency features while Ruby emphasizes flexibility, elegance and fun. - Common tasks like routing, templates, unit tests and specs are similar between Rails and Play frameworks for Ruby and Scala respectively, though Ruby uses more optional conventions while Scala requires more strict conventions.