Ask HN: Why do people consider Ruby better than Perl or vice versa?

I'm personally a fan of both (and continuously delighted by learning new things in both languages). I'm spending more time with Ruby lately because it looks like it's where the community is going and is fashionable these days, but I have no real major issues with perl itself.

Perl is often a stereotyped as unreadable, but it's largely up to the writers of the code itself to make it _that_ illegible; it's not a consequence of the language.

I prefer ruby just because, I tend to be able to read and understand other people's ruby code easier than other people's perl code.

Maybe that is something about the language, maybe it is something about the people who use each, maybe it is something about their cultures or something about me. In the end it doesn't matter much to me.

$foo is a scalar

@foo is an array

$foo[0] is the first element of @foo, instead of @foo[0]

As far as I know, Larry Wall's rationale as a linguist was that in English, one would say "this apple" and "these apples", but "this third apple" instead of "these third apple". The problem is that code isn't a human language, and obeying these rules doesn't make sense and puts additional cognitive strain on the programmer. Basically, having different syntax quirks for scalars, arrays, hashes, and file handles makes code unnecessarily weird, especially when combining them for things like multi-dimensional arrays.

From the Ruby FAQ:

"If you like Perl, you will like Ruby and be right at home with its syntax. If you like Smalltalk, you will like Ruby and be right at home with its semantics. If you like Python, you may or may not be put off by the huge difference in design philosophy between Python and Ruby/Perl."

http://www.rootr.net/rubyfaq-2.html

Well, one argument is that the language (and community) should encourage good/readable/maintainable code.