[ccashell]

Yeah, I'm gonna have to completely disagree with you here.

I'm a sysadmin that does a decent amount of automation and scripting work. Almost all of that is done in Perl. Among the other guys on my team, everyone uses Perl, except for one person who uses Python.

We had one person who came into the team as a Ruby fan. Within 6 months of working with us, she'd become a Perl fan. She told me she'd passed on Perl and gone to Ruby because she'd heard bad things about Perl. After seeing it in use and checking it out a little closer, she realized that almost everything she'd heard "bad" was outdated, incorrect, or overstated.

Outside of my team, I know lots of people who use Perl, a decent number of people who use Python, and a very small number of people who actually use Ruby. Yeah, there's a few high-profile apps in it, and yeah, Ruby on Rails got it a lot of attention for quick and dirty web apps, but it has a long way to go before it'll reach anywhere near Perl (or even Python) is.