Ruby seemed okay; but didn't seem to offer anything special over Perl.

I learned Perl and Ruby at about the same time maybe 12 years ago because I had a problem that I wanted to solve and was poking around at what tools would get me going fastest. There were some useful Perl tools, so I started with that, then tried both Rails and Catalyst and kept getting hung up on getting Catalyst to install, while Rails was painless at the time. I have no idea how they compare today.

At the time, I also thought that Ruby had a slightly cleaner object syntax (as a relative beginner at OO languages). Now I honestly don't even notice whether I'm using an OO interface to a Perl module vs a functional- I look through the docs and call things however they want to be called. The language has a lot of flexibility and I tend to just roll with it.