I had a quick look at Ruby a little while ago. Now I know that it's unfair to make judgements about languages without using them in anger to actually *see* the benefits and costs. However what struck me at the time (and I think it's still kinda true) is that Ruby's did not offer clear benefits over the existing solutions.

For instance, take a look at Ruby's comparison page. It's improvements over Perl are: nicer syntax, different default scoping, cleaner integration of object-orientedness. The first two hardly make for a decisive argument. The OO integration model is nicer than Perl but I don't think that this alone make for a compelling argument to switch to Ruby.

I might be prejudiced here, but I basically believe that many who like Perl do so because it's a very free-form language, suitable for quick hacks. Thats my 2 cents anyway.

However as I mentioned at the top I have never taken a significant amount of time to try and implement anything in Ruby. What about anybody else? Does anyone with experience of Perl and Ruby want to share their feelings?

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