"java or c#...are also syntactically much easier [than Ruby] for newbies."
Wait, what?
Wait, what?
Granted, ruby and python aren't as bad as perl, but they definitely aren't as regular as java either.
Of course, once you start getting into advanced topics, all that can go out the window, but at that point we aren't talking about a newbie anymore, so what we/they will expect from a language will be different.
I wouldn't mix those two when making a comparison to Perl.
As an example, there are like four different ways to write a simple 'if' statement in Ruby, with some blurring the difference between that statement and conditional expression (ternary operator in C-like languages). In Python, there is just one 'if' statement which is also clearly distinct from 'if-else' conditional expression.