[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.