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He's got a good point. And honestly, if you're productive in Perl or Python (or really any language that can do the job of Ruby), stick with it. Ruby is just one option among many.

While there are benefits to over-specializing in a language, there's a danger in that you'll ignore really cool and useful concepts and stop growing in general as a developer

I'm not saying you should replace your language, but at the same time it really doesn't hurt to at least play with and experience a language to figure out what all the hype (or crap) is; instead of just forming a strong early opinion and talking (positively or negatively) about something based on just pure conjecture and 2nd hand rumors.

The title of this article should really be "Why Perl interests me." because his reasoning basically is that he learned Perl rather than Ruby and Perl does what he wants. That's great, but really the argument could be applied to any other language, couldn't it?

By the way, I'm a longtime Perl programmer. For a couple years, Ruby didn't interest me. Until I tried it--now it interests me. A lot. Yes, Perl can do everything I want it to do, it's more widely deployed, etc., and I still use Perl. But you really have to take the time to learn Ruby before you can truly appreciate the elegance of the language. I look forward to Ruby 2.0 and more widespread deployment--interesting times ahead!