the syntax is much more regular and more verbose, but that can be a good thing. The regularity means that it's easier to remember what's supposed to come next/how to do something, and the verbosity means that there's less obfuscated phrases.

Granted, ruby and python aren't as bad as perl, but they definitely aren't as regular as java either.

Of course, once you start getting into advanced topics, all that can go out the window, but at that point we aren't talking about a newbie anymore, so what we/they will expect from a language will be different.