For the accessor example, you can make it obvious that the Perl is an assignment by giving the method an unambiguous name:
$instance->set_member( $new_value );
That takes care of any functional advantage the Ruby syntax might have; anything else is a matter of personal taste. (I won't suggest using an lvalue accessor because AIUI that's not as expressive as the Ruby, though it can provide identical syntax for simple cases.)
As for the sorting example --
use Sort::Key 'keysort'; # or ukeysort, for optimisation freaks
@array = keysort { abs } @array;
is not significantly more complicated than the Ruby. |