Mr P wrote:

> Anyhow- as the team director, I'm always *looking ahead*. Although Perl
> is still serving us well, I'm thinking for the benefit of our
> developers ( to get more languages in their personal toolkit ) as well
> as making productivity improvements through OO design and the ruby
> environment, I'm starting to talk up and promote Ruby as the NEXT
> language.

I am a professional software tester, and I started my career by reading
COBOL and C, but doing no programming.  I started programming seriously
with Perl and picked up Ruby because of the Watir project, and because
Ruby was becoming the de facto language for serious software testers.

Today I mostly use Ruby, but have no problems switching to Perl if the
Perl tools are better, or if Perl is a better fit for the environment.
 For instance, when I need Expect, I use Perl's, because it's better
than Ruby's.  When I need a SOAP client, I use Ruby's, because soap4r
is better than *everybody's*.  Also, you can't beat Perl for serious
network programming, mostly thanks to the work of Lincoln Stein.

You might keep an eye out for Brian Marick's new book, which has all
kinds of examples of neat things to do with Ruby.  I'll bet there are
some miniature projects in there that your team could try.
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/bmsft/index.html