From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2006-04-27T07:07:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for command line applications

On Wednesday 26 April 2006 3:47 pm, Stuart Stegall wrote:

> It could just be me, but I feel that the biggest difference is more
> cultural vs technical.  You can write long elegant Perl code and you can
> write short obfusticated Ruby code. (If you were talking about OLD Perl
> obviously this is a different argument, but current 5.5+ is entirely
> capable.)

But that's not what I am talking about.   It had nothing at all to do with a 
cultural difference when I was comparing the two languages, and everything to 
do with the languages.  I was largely rewriting Perl code that was written to 
be terse but readable/maintainable.  There were isolated examples of a small 
piece of Perl being shorter than equivalent Ruby, but for any given body of 
code longer than a few lines, almost without exception, my newbie-Ruby (i.e. 
I wasn't very sophisticated with my use of the language) was shorter and more 
readable than Perl with equivalent functionality.

I had a directory of examples of this.  It's one of the things that convinced 
me that learning and using Ruby was a good thing to be doing.


Kirk Haines