I just started playing with Ruby, not knowing enough about it to do any comparison. I was bitten by the "ruby on rails" bug, so just had to try it out. It was nice and simple, at least for the simple example I tried. It's nice to do some comparisons, but that shouldn't really be the base for learning or not learning a language, I think we should all try to learn other languages, at least that helps us to appreciate perl, and stay away from its weaknesses (in my humble opinion: threads, gui, POE is also behind python's Twisted)