As far Ruby and Lich goes, well the main page sums it up:

Why Ruby and not (Python/Perl/Java/etc.)?

In the interest of saving time, I can sum it up by saying: I used Ruby because it's a personal preference of mine and the interpreter requires very little modification to function fully in an embedded environment.
But then again, having a fair amount of experience at least with bash scripting and C++, Ruby is awesome, and perl and python can both blow me. If I say anything bad about Java one of my good friends is going to get really angry with me, but I can say I play on Warlock and you can make your scripts in Java if you want (not JavaScript though), and there are a fair number of them available on the Warlock forums, etc.

I ordered David Flanagan's Ruby text before I knew about lich (interestingly, he also has the best book on Java), so one of these days I'm going to actually learn Ruby instead of writing hacky garbage; no wait, I always write hacked code, nevermind.