From: znmeb@... Date: 2006-09-18T22:43:38+09:00 Subject: Re: the future of Ruby Quoting Joan Iglesias : > In my case, it's not just a matter of adapt a script. Maybe it can be > not a small program. And if I have to sell my program or in my case my > web program in Ruby and I cannot garantee a long life to the program > with the minimum modifications, I'll not sell it. > > I think, Ruby is now suffering to many changes, because it's very young > and because there isn't a big company behind (like in Java), that forces > backward compatibility ALWAYS. > > It could be a good idea to mantein backward compatibility in the same > way that perl will matein it between Perl 5 and Perl 6. > > http://dev.perl.org/perl6/faq.html > > At least to have an option in the compiler or interpreter to specicy the > compatibility requered. Or imagine I have a lot of ruby 1.8 libraies, I > can lose time modifying all the libraries because a change in the > language. > > In my case, and mainly because of backward compatibility I choose Perl. > I'm sure that in a near future Ruby will be the choise, but now is Perl > for a lot of reasons: > > 1- backward compatibility. > 2- A big comunity. > 3- a very huge amount of modules. > 4- fast programming, but in this case you have to take more care of good > programmation. > > Thank you > > Joan I'm not at all sure about Perl 5 -> Perl 6, but I had a Perl language change break a number of my scripts when Perl's Unicode support became "operational". Specifically, I was using byte constants in compares, and the Perl default switched from byte semantics to character semantics. So Perl isn't actually angelic in this arena either. I don't know if the Perl community sent out warnings about this or not; I've never been a member of the Perl community, and the Perl version changed only because the underlying Red Hat version changed. Still, the subset of Perl that I use is pretty much Perl 4 and will pretty much run on a DOS Perl 4 interpreter. It's old code, and thankfully not a large code base, and thankfully nearly 100 percent my own, and thankfully not mission-critical. Lessons learned: join the community, track versions of the software you use, have frequent code reviews, etc. I don't think your arguments rule out Ruby and rule in Perl. A more practical assessment based on the number of available Perl programmers and your own or your colleagues' greater familiarity with Perl is probably a more compelling argument than the "backward compatibility" argument, since all software is subject to backward compatibility issues. In any event, good luck with your project.