From: Julian Fitzell <julian-ml@...4.com>
Date: 2001-11-08T03:45:49+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24564] Re: Ruby presentation

On 08/11/2001 at 2:07 AM Eric Lee Green wrote:

>On Wednesday 07 November 2001 09:41 am, Milan wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I will present Ruby in our company in a short while. The aim of the
>> presentation is to persuade the rest of my R&D team to go for Ruby (in
>> Win32 environment) as a main higher-level language (we are currently
>using
>> Perl) in our development environment.
>
>Unless you have pressing needs calling for a change in language, it is
>likely 
>that changing languages will be more expensive than simply continuing with 
>Perl. I hate Perl, personally. I think it's a write-only language that is 
>usable primarily for small throw-away scripts rather than serious 
>programming. 

This seems contradictory. The fact that Perl is a "write-only language that is usable primarily for small throw-away scripts" seems like a perfectly good "pressing need" for changing language, particularly when it appears they *are* using it for more than small scripts.

>However, if your company's expertise is Perl, it'd be rather 
>silly to go to a language where your company has no expertise. 
>
>I would suggest that you need to wait until there is a problem for which
>Ruby 
>is more appropriate than Perl to continue in that vein. In my case, I
>needed 
>to prototytpe a Java application. Ruby has a much better mapping to Java
>than 
>Perl does, so Ruby was the most appropriate solution.
>
>Generally, language wars don't gain many adherents. People see you as
>being a 
>fanatic looking for perfection, rather than as an engineering trying to
>get a 
>job done in the most cost-effective manner possible.

It may well be that switching to Ruby is the most cost-effective manner.  Obviously this needs to be evaluated but that may the very purpose of the presentation.

If we say that:
1) Ruby is easy to learn (seems to be a general consensus)
2) Ruby is faster to develop in than Perl (certainly seems to be for me at least)
3) Ruby is easier to maintain than Perl (by your admition)

it seems quite likely that you could easily see a dramatic savings, if not over the short-term, certainly over the medium-term, so to speak.

Obviously this isn't going to be true in all cases but it's certainly worth looking at.

Julian