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State of the Onion 11
chromatic writes "Larry Wall's State of the Onion 11 address is now online. Every year, he describes the state of Perl and its community through metaphor and analogy. This year, Larry explored the history of scripting languages, from their dimly-lit beginnings to their glorious future. Along the way, he also describes several of the design principles invoked in the design of Perl 6. 'When I was a RSTS programmer on a PDP-11, I certainly treated BASIC as a scripting language, at least in terms of rapid prototyping and process control. I'm sure it warped my brain forever. Perl's statement modifiers are straight out of BASIC/PLUS. It even had some cute sigils on the ends of its variables to distinguish string and integer from floating point. But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book.'"
Though Ruby may have borrow some syntax features from Perl, most of the Ruby community stay away from them. I don't think you'll find much Ruby code out there that in any way resembles Perl. Like you, I'm negatively-inspired by Perl, after working for a company that had huge amounts of Perl code as a large portion of their infrastructure.
Code should be pleasing to read, since we spend so much of our lives at this activity. I think Python and Ruby do well in this goal, though the double underscores like "__init__" in Python always bothered me. Of course the Ruby '@' prefix to indicate class scope probably bothers those who haven't wasted away hours in Rogue-ish pursuits.