Man, I like perl, and learning how to operate these sorts of regular expressions is useful, but a lot of the the "one-liners" are infested with magic variables

Man, I like perl, and learning how to operate these sorts of regular expressions is useful, but a lot of the the "one-liners" are infested with magic variables and the sort of freakish syntactical constructs which give the language a bad name. Good Perl is basically 72% of Ruby. (Less syntactic sugar. Less-structured reflection. And mildly crufty sigils - not that you'll notice those after your second week, though.)