I was a Perl developer for 8 years before Ruby and I think it's where I got the habit from - it's a very 'Perl thing' to do! :-)
Java does seem an odd choice. I don't disrespect Java, but for very quickly loading in data, making changes, etc, it's going to be far from a few lines I suspect..
I wonder if people still voluntarily move from Perl to Ruby, other than for financial reasons. I had to dive into Python and Ruby for my dissertation. I didn't like Python, but I completely understood how it would be possible to. Ruby just felt like a less predictable Perl with more immature tooling.
I haven't used Ruby in years, but I used it a lot for toy projects at home, and I recently looked at a few of these, and I was kind of impressed - even after years, and almost without any comments, the code was still very readable and rather beautiful. Ruby can be very elegant and pleasant to use; I have never used it for web applications, though.
(At work, I use Perl quite a lot, though. I recently have started trying to use Go for problems I normally use Perl for. But the jury is still out on how well that works.)
Java does seem an odd choice. I don't disrespect Java, but for very quickly loading in data, making changes, etc, it's going to be far from a few lines I suspect..