[giraffe_lady]

I don't know if its backwards compatibility reaches into the 90s but I've been using ruby for this for like a decade now. Most envs that ship with anything ship with ruby and I've only very rarely run into version problems.

I think people tend to associate it only with a certain era of web dev, but it has remained a good scripting language with a large, consistent, well-documented standard library for a long time now.

Not worth switching off perl since you're very used to that, but iirc ruby was initially conceived as a successor to perl and for me at least it has landed in that role.

[jrumbut]

Ruby is a fantastic scripting language and I generally use it instead of Perl but for the ugliest corner cases, character encoding gotchas, *nix system oddities, etc I frequently find someone from the Perl community has had my problem and solved it with a regex.

I think it's the sysadmin culture. If your scripts are used by thousands of different servers hosting custom web apps and strange databases you'll run into every possible bug fast.

[forgotmypw17]

Ruby is great, and I know people who swear by it, but I've yet to come across a GNU/Linux distro which didn't come with Perl installed, while Ruby is not a given in the default, e.g. my current Manjaro.

The compatibility really does stretch back all the way to '94.

[pseudostem]

On OpenBSD, some of the scripts or utils (mandoc) are written in Perl because the developers prefer it. There have been some email chains on the mailing lists about having Perl in base. Most of them are interesting to read.

[anthk]

The pkg_* suite it's written in Perl.