Having used Ruby a bit and Perl a lot, I definitely prefer Ruby's syntax. It has a lot of the same shortcuts that Perl does, but is significantly more regular. With better defaults. And I find that as I go to more complex conceptual code, Perl is far more likely to get ugly on me.

As the AOL folk would say - me too !

I loathe optional semicolons

I love 'em. The less I have to type the better :-)

Secondly, I strongly dislike the lack of a variable declaration, meaning that there is no easy equivalent of strict available.

Curiously enough I've never found this a problem. I thought I would when I first read the Pickaxe book - before I did any coding. However I've never found it a problem in real life. My guess is that my test suites catch these mistakes early enough for it never to be a problem.

Thirdly the Ruby philosophy of, "Oh, add every alias someone might expect for this" has a conceptual cost when reading someone else's code.

I agree this is a pain, but I think enough people are pushing back against this idea now that it's a problem the community will fix.