As a Perl developer I'd say »More power to them.« Also, since Perl's => is basically a comma operator that turns a bareword on its left into a string, I'd say R

As a Perl developer I'd say »More power to them.« Also, since Perl's => is basically a comma operator that turns a bareword on its left into a string, I'd say Ruby's move is a step away from Perl regarding syntax, but a step towards Perl regarding functionality. Anyway, as a non-Ruby developer I can appreciate the move. Also reminds a bit of some Scheme's ability to prefix and postfix symbols with »:«.