[mopoke]

People naturally compare Ruby and Perl because of the well-known similarities and influence that Perl had on the development of Ruby.

Ruby followers can rightly claim advantages over Perl (for me, the fact that you can do OO in Ruby without feeling that you're doing some kind of black magic is the big one).

But Perl devs could be justified in feeling that Ruby is doing nothing new - many of the libraries that make Ruby so useful have equivalents (predecessors in some cases) in Perl.