While Matz wants people to like his language, *EVERYTHING*
that I have seen him write indicates that he absolutely
hates language wars and language advocacy. Lots of others
engage in that, but he doesn't. His statements do quite
the opposite in fact.
As for the rest of what you say, well look on my home node.
I am fairly confident that I know both Perl and Ruby pretty
well (I know Perl better of course), and what I have
found is that learning Ruby gave me insights into design
tradeoffs in Perl that have helped me see Perl in a clearer
light. I can, depending on my mood, give people darned good
reasons for programming in either language over the other.
But what I cannot do is say that learning new languages
is a bad idea.
But don't take my word on it. Instead let me point at
a justly
famous article written by Dominus on the topic...