(Although it wasn't "perfectly functioning" Perl code but whilst it was an abhorrent mess internally, the actual problems were largely caused by the database parts - awful schema, bad server setups, godawful queries from an insane home-grown ORM, etc., which could all have been fixed in a couple of months.)
Node at least is sexy, and I suspect will continue with large numbers of people writing it.
Ruby however seems to be as esoteric as perl - its not js or python or java in ubiquity, it's not loved like rust and go, it doesn't have the longevity of perl, c and bash. Perl5 has run, pretty much unchanged, for over 20 years, meaning no need to update my programs. Ruby on the other hand is a treadmill language. Code written in 2005 (when rails came out and it was the new hotness) wasn't runnable a mere 10 years later in 2015. I have processes that have longer runtime!*
Time will tell how long Ruby 2 lasts, but I'd wager that perl 5 lasts longer that ruby 2.
I'm interested in stable languages that just work for most of the things I write -- I want something to perform a task and carry on doing it with minimal effort for the next decade or two. I'm not interested in perl 6 or 7 because its a new language, it's competing in a crowded sphere other more recent languages.
> Perl5 has run, pretty much unchanged, for over 20 years, meaning no need to update my programs.
One of my CLI tools that lives in $HOME/bin on every machine I touch, is perl code I wrote in 1990. Haven't changed it once since then, just keep copying it everywhere.
(Although it wasn't "perfectly functioning" Perl code but whilst it was an abhorrent mess internally, the actual problems were largely caused by the database parts - awful schema, bad server setups, godawful queries from an insane home-grown ORM, etc., which could all have been fixed in a couple of months.)