No - not the "unholy" part. Like vidarh I'm someone who loves Ruby (why else would I write a book about it!) but I do agree with him about the internal implementation: it's very confusing and hard to understand. At times, this leaks out into the syntax of an otherwise beautiful language. JRuby and especially Rubinius are great alternatives to MRI if you're interested in studying internals - they're much cleaner and easier to understand.

Sorry I don't know anything about the internals of Smalltalk, Python or Perl and can't comment on them.