One thing I miss is the amenities to reduce the amount of quoting the user has to do when using hashes. Compare:

h = {"one"=>1, "two"=>2, "three"=>3 }
h["four"] = 4
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to this in perl:

%h = (one=>1, two=>2, three=>3);
$h{four} = 4;
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You can tell perl was written by a linguist -- there's more interest in making the language expressive, with natural shortcuts, rather than "pure."

Being able to convert input strings to numbers instantly is another nice shortcut. "Everything's an object" gets in the way of that in ruby.

The worst thing is the complete lack of a protective mode like "use strict;" as I discussed here. Writing in ruby feels unsafe to me.

Perhaps I am spoiled by some of the features in perl. If I had started first with ruby I might like it better.