I was a Perl dev in the 90s, have since used PHP, Ruby, node and Python and I must agree that there is something "perl like" in Ruby. I don't know what it is, maybe it's the feeling of naturalness when writing, maybe the fact that "there is more than one way of doing it", but despite the languages between quite different Ruby is the closest to Perl that I know. Except that I can actually read it quite well even months after I have written something.