While Matz wants people to like his language, *EVERYTHING* that I have seen him write indicates that he absolutely hates language wars and language advocacy. Lots of others engage in that, but he doesn't. His statements do quite the opposite in fact.

As for the rest of what you say, well look on my home node. I am fairly confident that I know both Perl and Ruby pretty well (I know Perl better of course), and what I have found is that learning Ruby gave me insights into design tradeoffs in Perl that have helped me see Perl in a clearer light. I can, depending on my mood, give people darned good reasons for programming in either language over the other. But what I cannot do is say that learning new languages is a bad idea.

But don't take my word on it. Instead let me point at a justly famous article written by Dominus on the topic...