I like these arguments, but they all end up being primarily anecdotal, i.e. "I've had this experience... which leads me to believe X". Being exposed to varying opinions is always enlightening. But is there any real hard evidence? Is it possible to get said evidence?

Here's a little data I compiled from the following two links at ohloh.net:

http://www.ohloh.net/languages/8

http://www.ohloh.net/languages/12

projects	contributors	commits	lang	commits/per	contributors/per
799	1,603	87,840	Ruby	109.94	2.01
2,488	7,131	300,288	Perl	120.69	2.87
0.32%	Ruby/Perl project ratio
0.22%	Ruby/Perl contributor ratio
0.29%	Ruby/Perl commit ratio

Based solely on this data (I have no idea how reliable or how good an indicator it really is), I'd say Perl is slightly ahead of Ruby.

Both languages seem pretty healthy, though.

Update: I shouldn't have posted while trying to hurry out the door. I did my division wrong in the "/per" columns, and those numbers weren't correct. It kept nagging at me, so I finally re-checked. The above should now make more sense.