By now it is no exaggeration for me to say that I know and have professionally used more than twenty programming languages ... and I have seen (and no doubt, written) both brilliance and utter-crap in all of them.

What I really like to discover, and part of what keeps me combing-through new languages (including Ruby and, yes, Perl), is the possibility of a fresh, new approach to "the same old lucrative problems." So when someone makes a convincing connection between web-site programming and quantum mechanics, well, I sit up and take notice. I try to shove these ideas into my mental back-pocket against the day when they'll pop-out again and become useful for something. For instance, when I glommed onto a computer-programming language (gprolog) that can solve any Sudoku problem in less than 10 lines of code... it was a discovery that more-or-less turned off whatever very mild interest I may have once had in Sudoku, but it impressed the heck out of my oldest nephew.

So far, my conclusions about Ruby are that “the only interesting thing about 'Ruby' is 'Rails,' and the only thing interesting about 'Rails' is 'prototype.js' and may-be 'scriptaculous,' which of course we already have access to, with-or-without Ruby and/or Rails.” Rolling-out "yet another language" is always problematic, especially when you are deploying to a shared-host environment where you are so completely forced to “bloom where you are planted.” Perl usually turns out to be “a pretty-good Roman” to do-as-they-do.

It can also be said that a different point-of-view is a useful thing, even if the “silver-bullet salesmen” who are hawking books and management-seminars about them don't quite know when to shut up. Ruby, for example, does introduce some very interesting concepts, although they are not nearly as new or original than their proponents suppose. I shudder to think that hell-itself just might be very similar to trying to live and work in any shop where “extreme programming” is actually practiced or attempted. Scott Adams (Dilbert) will never run out of source-material... and neither will dice-dot-com.

I definitely agree with Larry Wall that “laziness, brilliance, and hubris” are all good-things to find in a practitioner. If I can find (for example...) a high-level framework that would allow me to do what the client wants without writing any custom code in any language, Perl or otherwise, then “wham, bam, thank-you-ma'am, I'm there” ... even to the degree that I would strive to master “whatever language it was written in.” (Which, I know, I can always do over the weekend. Hubris, remember?)

So, seek not forgiveness for using and trying another language, nor for deciding that it's no-better than the one(s) that you know. There is no silver-bullet anywhere. Any practitioner in this business must always be able to pick-up whatever bullet happens to be handy, put it in his pistol, pull the trigger, and hit the target squarely with profit to spare.