From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) Date: 2001-11-08T04:02:16+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:24566] Re: Ruby presentation In article <20011107170716.MHCL24880.femail10.sdc1.sfba.home.com@there>, 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. However, if your company's expertise is Perl, it'd be rather >silly to go to a language where your company has no expertise. Sure, it would be very expensive if you were proposing that all your company's Perl code be rewritten in Ruby... But if you propose that a new, upcoming project be done in Ruby (and make the case for why Ruby is a good fit), then you start building 'momentum' within the group toward Ruby. I personally think that the transistion from programming in Perl to programming in Ruby is a fairly easy one to make and I suspect that most of your Perl programmers (probably not all) will feel quite comfortable working with Ruby after only a short time (a couple of weeks, that was my experience). Ultimately, as this 'test' project progresses to completion (and is successful) there might be some suggestions that older Perl code be rewritten in Ruby. Again, I think one of the main points to stress is the ease in transitioning from Perl to Ruby. Show how much easier OO programming in Ruby is compared to Perl (even many Perl advocates will acknowledge that OO Perl is ugly and painful). Also you could emphasize that the upcoming Perl6 is something of an unknown and that it will be very much like learning a completely new language. Phil -- rm -rf /bin/laden