“I think actually Perl was immensely important to the development of programming languages. I don’t think programming languages, like Ruby, would look the way it does if we didn’t have Perl. Without offending anybody, I see it as a step on an evolutionary chain. Larry Wall tried out some cool stuff like hippies and LSD and we opened our minds somehow and that’s great because it’s opened our minds for other, more sensible things. What I’m basically saying is that we wouldn’t have Ruby if it wasn’t for Perl. Perl deserves all the thanks in the world for that. I think that Ruby is trying exceedingly hard to be welcoming to Perl. There are a lot of Perlisms that you can do in Ruby but are not encouraged. I think Perl and Ruby are together in that they are not as strict in the one way approach. You’ll get the One Way in Rails. Perl programmers naturally feel more comfortable in Ruby than they do in Python. That’s just the few Perl people I’ve talked to that have tried Python and Ruby. ” DHH via http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2939556954580527226