From: Leslie Viljoen <leslieviljoen@...>
Date: 2006-06-13T06:37:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's role in future operating systems

On 6/10/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
> I pretty much gave up on shell scripting about a decade ago. I was so
> used to real programming languages with real syntax that I only used
> shell scripting for "quick and dirty hacks". As far as I'm concerned,
> anything with a loop or an if-then-else in it is worthy of a real
> programming language with a real syntax and semantics.
>
> Shells were an improvement over JCL, to be sure. And the C shell was
> better than the Bourne shell, KSH and Bash are better than the C shell,
> in terms of programmability and readability.
>
> But once Perl (4) came along, I tossed out "awk" and "sed" and even
> "grep" for the most part. I still type stuff like
>
> du -sm * | sort -k 1 -nr | more
>
> and
>
> emerge -puvDN world 2>&1 | tee world-update.log
>
> at the command line, but if it's a *program*, it goes into a script with
> comments and configuration management, etc., and it's written in Perl. I
> fully intend to learn Ruby as a Perl replacement, but for now, the
> neurons fire in Perl.

You are in for a treat. I went along the same path, but now most of my
scripts use objects and they are maintained with the greatest of ease.
Oh the massive Perl spaghetti that I have converted to a few lines of
elegant, easy-to-read Ruby makes me say: I think you should start
forcing yourself to do all new scripts in Ruby instead. You'll be
happier almost immediately.

After working in Perl for so long, I like to think of Ruby as the
thing Perl is trying to be.

Les