How about they start getting rid of some weird syntax first?

Ruby proponents love to joke about semicolons, but then replace that problem with @. There's the really strange ".." vs "..." You can't type variables if you want to. #{} makes some strings look like linenoise. Regex is hamstrung. "end" is questionable.

If you fixed the first three, a significant source of errors would just vanish. Why Ruby replaces s/// with sub/gsub is beyond me. #{} needs to die.

Anyway, Ruby really is superficially quite similar to Perl, which is why I like it. I think of it as Python for Perl coders. If only it was faster (is YARV ready for prime time?).