I think it's a little less Perl than that, and a little more Lisp than that. I don't have enough Perl experience to have a strong opinion on it, but I know tha

I think it's a little less Perl than that, and a little more Lisp than that. I don't have enough Perl experience to have a strong opinion on it, but I know that Matz says he created Ruby because he wanted a language that was more powerful than Perl and more object-oriented than Python. Ruby is a little bipolar in that sense. It's both highly functional and highly object-oriented, for an imperative language. Even more of a "Swiss-army chainsaw" than Perl.