Is Ruby the new Perl?

I just now completed the ruby tutorial over at try ruby! and I couldn't help but think how much ruby is like Perl. My first programming jobs in college were using mostly Perl so I have some (mostly) fond memories of how easy Perl made some tasks. I know I am late to the party when it comes to checking out ruby. I just don't really have alot of opportunity to use it outside of my free time. I finally decided to answer the call of Scott Hanselman and try it out. Just like Perl made working with text files and regular expressions really simple, ruby (and more specifically, rails), seems to do that for web development. I plan on spending alot more time looking into ruby/rails but I just wanted to share my initial thoughts. I can remember doing things like:

open(FILE) or die "cant open file";

in perl and when I see:

Time.now - 2.weeks

in ruby it takes me back to those days. I was just recently talking to a recruiter who was looking for Perl developers. I was really surprised that new startups are actually choosing technologies like Perl when things like ruby on rails exist.