perl has use strict to enforce variable declarations
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=405770

ruby requires local vars to be assigned to before use
but has no compile-time-checking of it
ruby -wc warns about assigned, but unused vars at least

Startup time is much slower:
https://plus.google.com/108928462394474625418/posts/H1W4b6C7qXV
https://github.com/bmwiedemann/onelinerbenchmark/blob/master/example-output.txt
partially because the rubygem library is parsed at start.
ruby1.8 was a bit faster than later versions


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