No, and if it is, who knows what version it is.

I think that's the main thing preventing one from using ruby like this. It is otherwise preferable in pretty much every way.

Perl is kind of pre-installed on virtually every Unix-like system for what are at this point historical/legacy reasons. It is unlikely any other language can ever achieve this at this point.

Indeed. As much as I would like to use Ruby or Raku for this type of stuff, I keep coming back to Perl because it's simply... there.

Sure, I could probably install Ruby on any machine I want it, but it's not just technical availability. Socially, Perl serves as a quite obvious Schelling point. I don't have to convince four other people to learn Ruby, because Perl is what everyone would gravitate to even in isolation, again because it's just... there.

(That said in recent years I've had to switch to Python for some things aimed at a younger audience. Oh well.)

AFAIR, Red Hat stopped including Perl by default since RHEL8 (

RHEL 9.0 provides the following dynamic programming languages:

    Node.js 16
    Perl 5.32
    PHP 8.0
    Python 3.9
    Ruby 3.0

Preinstalled?

Just a data point — Ruby, Perl and Python have all been deprecated [0] in macOS.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

If it's not installed already, Ruby will be installed ASAP on any machine I use.

You're confusing perl with ruby there.