Ruby vs. Perl

• Ruby is legible, and as a result, easier to learn, and easier to maintain
• Ruby is a true object-oriented language, whereas Perl was originally a non-OOL, and had OOL features built on top
• Ruby uses many of Perl's best features, most notibly extended regular expressions

Ruby vs. Python

• Python differentiates between classes and types (Ruby does not), and thus limits types so they have no inheritance, subclassing, cannot add methods to existing ones
• Superior operator overloading
• Extensions written in C/C++ can easily define Ruby classes

Ruby vs. Java

• Ruby is interpreted
• Ruby is "more" object-oriented than Java. An example is that "1" is an instance of the Fixnum class
• Ruby's variable and expressions are not statically typed