The part about Smalltalk's influence on Ruby is a good callout. Smalltalk has influenced many languages: Python's 'everything is an object (like Ruby)'; Objecti

The part about Smalltalk's influence on Ruby is a good callout. Smalltalk has influenced many languages: Python's 'everything is an object (like Ruby)'; Objective-C's message sending syntax; JS's 'self'; and probably Scala. Not sure what else (besides Ruby of course). As for Perl, I think besides Ruby probably PHP (began as "Personal Home Page Tools — a set of Perl-like macros") and JS (expressions, variable pragmas, loose semantics) have the clearest influence.