Jim Weirich was a heavy perl user for a long time, and we were both involved in the Cincinnati perl mongers group. He found ruby and fell in love. He thought Ruby would be a good fit for me and we had a long conversation about why he preferred it to perl. It took me a few years, but I eventually took his advice. As usual, Jim was right, and I haven't written any perl since then.
tl;dr: for me, ruby killed perl.