I like Ruby a lot. I started using it because I'm a system tester and WATIR is poised to kick Mercury and Rational for UI testing (at least where IE is the browser, but there's talk of merging WATIR and Selenium, which will be outrageous.)

I'm not good with objects, so I struggle handling scope in Ruby, but once I suss out my issues, I'm finding Ruby more and more elegant and intuitive.

Perl is still more powerful in a lot of ways (I probably wouldn't do network programming in Ruby) but I'm having a good time parsing files, doing ODBC, web-based stuff like HTTP and SOAP, and building test frameworks.

In fact, the niftiest part of Ruby is the ability to quickly make abstractions that look like Domain Specific Languages or frameworks (in the strict definition of "framework".) Remember, your framework should be abstracted from your application, and Ruby makes doing that super easy.