Spent a little more time looking at Ruby tonight, and at least looking at the basics of the language it is very striking how Perl like it is, so much so that at times the changes in syntax feel arbitrary. (is %w{} really nicer then qw{}?)

Looking at it (but not really doing much coding) I’m struck that Ruby can be even more punctuation heavy then Perl, which really contributes to the “it looks like line noise” critique.

But my favorite quote from Prog Ruby so far is:

In general, there’s a move away from some of the Perlisms in the Ruby community. If you run your programs with the -w flag to enable warnings (you do run with warnings enabled, don’t you?), you’ll find the Ruby interpreter catches most of them. (ed. emphasis mine)

-w certainly looks like a Perlism to me. :)