I found Ruby's variable scoping to be quite clean: local by default, unless prefixed to be an instance variable (and a few conventions for statics and constant

I found Ruby's variable scoping to be quite clean: local by default, unless prefixed to be an instance variable (and a few conventions for statics and constants, I think). I wish Perl had similar scoping rules instead of the layered on later techniques of "my" and "the blessed hash". But I still like Perl :-) However, the rest sounds like a valid criticism of Ruby.