From: Adrian Howard <adrianh@...>
Date: 2005-08-13T00:56:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Performance

On 12 Aug 2005, at 16:39, Bradley Kite wrote:

> Compared with - say - slashdot?
[snip]

I'm sure with sufficient effort somebody could run Amazon with a  
large parallel group of highly trained stoats. Who cares :-)

There are large web sites built with Java, Perl, Ruby, C++, Lisp, C#,  
PHP and god knows how many other languages. PHP and Perl didn't build  
their market share because they were /faster/ - they built it because  
they were /better/ (for certain definitions of "better").

Perl's big advantage is that it's a nice flexible language that  
enable you to build applications quickly and reliably (despite what  
some people say :)

Ruby's advantage over Perl 5 is that it does some stuff that Perl 5  
can't do, and makes much of the stuff it can do easier (in certain  
areas anyway).

Compare the simplicity of overriding some_method= with messing with  
lvalue subs and tied variables to get the same affect in Perl 5. Some  
things are simpler and, when it comes to writing and maintaining  
code, simpler is better.

Adrian