Ruby (www.ruby-lang.org)? It's immensely powerful, lots of libraries that are easy to install with a single command, and it (the language and it's community to be precise) focuses on readability and good practices. A friend of mine has a nice experience of using it to automate tests of a large (10M members) social network site. She was assigned with a test of testing things manually; fortunatelly, her boyfriend is a software developer. It took just a few quick lessons and she's now writing her own tests (no programming background whatsoever). Just my $0.02 MB