Agreed but keep in mind the Perl community were black sheep for years because the language is so (admittedly) hairy and ugly oh and also not a "real" programming language because it gained adoption when scripting languages still had a stigma. And the community had its own issues; there were sites like "Matt's Script Archive" distributing horridly insecure code (read through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt's_Script_Archive). But time has a way of changing both communities and how they are seen. Like I said, old is good. Programming communities age like wine. (Which means they improve and improve -- until they peak at which point all bets are off.)

Yeah. The condition of rubygems are generally so bad (unfinished and/or abandoned), that I would strongly recommend Python over Ruby for new projects - which is a shame, in the core language Ruby is more elegant and more fun to write, and I know Ruby much better than I know Python. (for a concrete example, compare "NumPy" to the various attempts at good math structures in ruby)

I wish I could recommend perl - CPAN modules generally really are amazingly high quality. But the mental cost of the perl programming model: no named params! arrayref vs array vs list! Contextual::Return! blessing scalars into objects! - that cost is just so friggin high that I can't imagine asking anyone to follow me there anymore.