Perl was the poster child of scripting languages. When I started hacking on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s (before there was a Perl 5), it was a miracle language. I was throwing out multi-thousand line C programs wholesale and replacing them with 50 line Perl scripts that worked far better (daemons and Sybase reports, mostly).

Around 2000-2001, I worked on Perl 5 in a close-knit team at a dotcom startup. Even with daily interaction, it was really hard to keep coding standards straight and readability under control. The problem with Perl is that it tends to be a different language for every programmer. Its flexibility leads to arcane code that can only be easily understood by the person who wrote it.

Years later, in different roles, I've worked extensively with both Ruby and Python (I prefer Ruby). I will never, ever, ever go back to Perl for anything more than one line long. I still use Perl for 'perl -e' one-liners in the shell, mostly complex greps. That's it. If I write anything small enough that structure doesn't matter, I use /bin/sh. If I write something large enough that structure matters, I use Ruby.

Why? Because I like to be able to read my code.

Ruby is wonderfully expressive. It can do everything Perl can, and it does it in a much more readable, much more human way.