While it is true that with ruby you have to know more syntax, without previous knowledge of either language you caught on pretty fast.
To me it is more expressive of my intent to say "0 to 5, for each, do something" than "for something in the 0 to 5 range do something"
Also you happened upon what peeves me most about Python, you are not actually looping from 0 to 5 since range is inclusive at the start, but exclusive at the end. So while (0..5) gives you 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, range(0,5) will get you just 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. Of course it's easier if you think that range() is rather "I want to take X steps", so if you just want to step 5 times range(5) does exactly what you need it to do.
It depends on what you're trying to do. It's pretty common with strings to ask for "everything excluding the first and the last character", for example, and then you want the end index (counted backwards), not length. Another common case is when you looked up a substring and got an index, and now you're slicing the string around that index.
But there are also many cases where length is more desirable.
Ditto with ranges - both end-inclusive and end-exclusive ranges are useful in different cases. I kinda like the fact that Ruby lets you choose, but I think that .. vs ... syntax distinction is too subtle and likely to cause bugs.
I kinda like the way Nim does it: .. for inclusive, and ..< for exclusive - e.g. 1..<10. They also use special syntax for count-from-end, instead of negative indices, which is also a good thing IMO (the decision to index from start or from end is usually something that's not going to change at runtime; but with negative indexing, it might inadvertently do so if you underflow when computing the index).
To me it is more expressive of my intent to say "0 to 5, for each, do something" than "for something in the 0 to 5 range do something"
Also you happened upon what peeves me most about Python, you are not actually looping from 0 to 5 since range is inclusive at the start, but exclusive at the end. So while (0..5) gives you 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, range(0,5) will get you just 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. Of course it's easier if you think that range() is rather "I want to take X steps", so if you just want to step 5 times range(5) does exactly what you need it to do.