[barrkel]

Ruby is a better Perl; it's closer to Perl than e.g. Python, it has fewer footguns but is also very expressive. It also has alternative quotes, backtick, shellescape etc. for ad hoc shell integration though you're better off learning IO.popen and others to take the shell out of the equation.

[bjornjajayaja]

Subjectivity aside: the fact stands that Perl is the most ubiquitous scripting language on Unix and the de facto standard. You’ll find it by default on many container environments as well—but hell if you’ll find Ruby. ;)

[tgragnato]

On most of my Linux systems Perl is only installed as a dependency of debconf or git.

I’m sure the Linux kernel community is still using it, but FreeBSD even managed to remove it from the base system.

It’s still ubiquitous… “standard”?