You may have given up on Ruby too soon. I'd encourage you to try again. What book were you using?
The fact that you called it "Ruby on Rails" does not inspire confidence. Rails is a complex Ruby framework, and a lot of Rails code actually consists of calls to a Ruby-based DSL for the Web. It's hard to appreciate the kinship between Ruby and Perl, or Ruby's usefulness for Perl-like tasks, when you approach the language from that high-level angle. Try Programming Ruby or The Ruby Way -- or, heck, try _Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby with Cartoon Foxes, which is how I learned, though its unique style is not for everyone.
Ruby was built by a Perl fan; it was named in honor of Perl, and I find that most of the glue-code tasks that were easy in Perl are even easier in Ruby.
I will certainly use Perl in the future -- one good thing about the language's awesome documentation culture, and its excellent automated build tools, is that they let you use Perl code without having to read any of it. But I don't read or write Perl anymore unless I really have to -- just as, back in 1999, I didn't use sed or awk and avoided writing shell scripts, because I had Perl.
I initially looked at Ruby a number of years ago, and didn't really care for the syntax either. Rails made me take a second look, and while I'm not sure I consider it a thing of beauty, it is eminently practical, and a pretty good compromise between Perl's minimalist style that lets you get lots done - and then forget what the heck it does, and Java's blah blah blah verbosity. Also, Ruby gems are handy - maybe not quite to the level of CPAN, but they're pretty good.
Prefacing a one-liner like this with "I don't know Rails..." is just begging to be downmodded, but damn... -3? This is a rough crowd.
I only have cursory experience with Rails and Catalyst, but the first thing I noticed is that Rails is much friendlier to Ruby novices than Catalyst is to Perl novices. Still, Catalyst is pretty nice if you're a Perl developer looking for a Rails-like framework.
I was comparing Ruby on Rails to Python with Django in that context; I looked at them when I was evaluating web frameworks, though obviously I deviated away from that in the rest of the post. Sorry if that was unclear.
As a one time ultra-heavy Perl programmer, when I returned to programming this year after a hiatus of several years, Ruby just made the most sense to me, and you do a good job of listing why.
I still use Perl occasionally, but essentially for *Nix sys-admin stuff.
The fact that you called it "Ruby on Rails" does not inspire confidence. Rails is a complex Ruby framework, and a lot of Rails code actually consists of calls to a Ruby-based DSL for the Web. It's hard to appreciate the kinship between Ruby and Perl, or Ruby's usefulness for Perl-like tasks, when you approach the language from that high-level angle. Try Programming Ruby or The Ruby Way -- or, heck, try _Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby with Cartoon Foxes, which is how I learned, though its unique style is not for everyone.
Ruby was built by a Perl fan; it was named in honor of Perl, and I find that most of the glue-code tasks that were easy in Perl are even easier in Ruby.
I will certainly use Perl in the future -- one good thing about the language's awesome documentation culture, and its excellent automated build tools, is that they let you use Perl code without having to read any of it. But I don't read or write Perl anymore unless I really have to -- just as, back in 1999, I didn't use sed or awk and avoided writing shell scripts, because I had Perl.