From: John Gabriele <jmg3000@...>
Date: 2006-04-28T00:42:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for command line applications

On 4/27/06, John Gabriele <jmg3000@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/26/06, Alan M <nospam@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am a Linux administrator and I use Perl for scripting.
> > I do not develop any web applications. My programs are command line
> > tools.
> >
> > At this phase I am thinking to upgrade my programming language to either
> > Python or Ruby.
> >
> > Considering the fact that I won't develop any web application, Which one
> > would be a better choice for me Perl or Ruby?
> >
> > Thank you,
> > Alan
> >
>
> They're both good choices. I'm fairly new to Ruby, but here's my 2 cents.
>
> [snip]
>
> Plusses for Ruby:
> - Ruby seems a little more tailored for admin work than Python (since
> Ruby has built in regexes, easy stdin/stdout)
> - RDoc (documentation for your scripts comes right from plain old
> comments above the thing they're documenting).
> - Personally, I prefer its (Perl-like) string handling to Python's.
>
> Minuses for Ruby:
> - Lack of docs (good printed books though)
>

By the way, there are, of course, other plusses for Ruby that are
relevant if you're looking at it for other uses besides system
administration.

Also, Ruby's a very consistent language too (dunno why I only
mentioned this for Python above -- they're both pretty
self-consistent).