You can write Ruby that looks like Perl, but in my experience (6 years of fulltime Ruby) this is very rare in the wild. I don't think I've ever seen a popular

You can write Ruby that looks like Perl, but in my experience (6 years of fulltime Ruby) this is very rare in the wild. I don't think I've ever seen a popular Rubygem with dense, nasty, Perl-like code. That sort of style may have been more prevalent in the early days of Ruby, which I'm roughly defining as the days before Rails.