You don't have to feel alone, after my day of playing with ruby, I couldn't agree more.

Things can start looking very messy with stuff like multiple assignments, and anti-intuitive expressions.

Perl still seems somewhat more intuitive to me, but maybe that's just because I've used it too much. But I still wouldn't wanna trade it in for c++.

I just tried ruby on rails, and my first impression seems that it's all Quick and Easy as long as you don't have to write something real. As soon as you want to start doing more advanced stuff you end up coding about just as much as you would in perl. Plus, after having read a bunch of tutorials and having tried a few simple database apps, I have to agree that the syntax is absolutely horrible. Not for me at all.

Very interesting. Is there any speed difference between a compiled exe and running the script over the perl exe? Is it really compiled? Or is it just script+interpreter in an exe?

Like App said,... AVG-free has always worked fine for me. it has a very small memory footprint and it's not bloaty, and it hasn't been for a while (knock on wood).