A crosspost from the Perl Community

All,

I've been thinking of myself as a Perl developer for the past several
years, and recently was handed a Ruby project. I collected some of my
thoughts on the experience for PerlMonks, and it was suggested that I
cross post in a Ruby forum to see what sorts of responses the other half
might have to offer.

Seeing as how I found Ruby to be a good language that I anticipate using
in the future, I think it's a good idea, and so I offer it below:

------

A recent project I've been working on has brought me into more intimate
contact with the Ruby programming language than I have had before, and
as I take a moment to return to maintaining some Perl apps I've written,
I thought I might share some of the the thoughts that came into the head
of this Perl programmer as he delved into Ruby for the first real time.

I don't mean this to be a exhaustive list of differences, a detailed
technical comparison, or an introduction of Ruby for Perl programmers.
Just a gathering of thoughts that I feel the need to share.

--What a Dump!--

I see it time and again: people dismiss Perl as ugly looking and hard to
maintain. As we all know this is because Perl lets you do all sorts of
elegant things; whether or not you *should* is another matter, and "Perl
Best Practices" stands as a very nice guidebook of do's and don'ts. I
know my code certainly improved after reading through it.

Ruby seems to escape this criticism, and yet it can be every bit as
ugly. A lack of curly braces around definitions takes some getting used
to, and it makes a poorly indented application hard to read at a glance.

Another big departure was in the lack of line separators (;), or perhaps
I should instead say that they're *optional*. While I can see the
argument that this forces readability via-a-vie a one line, one
statement structure, the fact that line separators can be used removes
this benefit.

Lesson: You can make Ruby every bit as messy as Perl if you want to.

--OOPs and Infrastructure--

Here I see a very clear benefit to Ruby. No doubt this speaks more to my
abilities with the language, but I learned Object Oriented programming
with Java, and moving into that particular area in Perl was cumbersome.

Ruby, on the other hand, is OO from the ground up, making it more
friendly to the Java trained OO programmer. Or at least to this one.
Ruby takes it a step further though, and does away with primitive types,
and the result is some very clever infrastructure. An array variable,
for example, is an instance of the Array object, and contains useful
methods for working with the array; iterators, for example. Hashes work
similarly.

From this Perl programmer's perspective, it takes some getting used to.
Instinctively one wants to write

_Perl Code_
foreach my $member @array { ... }

rather than

_Ruby Code_
array.each { ... }

Then again, that's a habit that one learns to change. Which brings me to
the next item.

--The Variable Appearance of Variables--

Perl programmers have got used to being able to tell what they're
looking at at a glance. $scalar, @array, %hash are all great ways of
being able to figure out what sort of data you're working with at the
moment. No looking back to see if c was declared as an int, a char, or a
float. Easier to keep track of what you and other people are doing.

Ruby doesn't use this convention, and boy did I miss it. The @ character
makes an appearance to signify a class variable, but that's it. The fact
that hashes and arrays are both indexed using square brackets ([])
contributes to the confusion. It's good that these elements are present,
but it's a potential pitfall, and again, it takes some getting used to.

Also, it helps you appreciate one of the ways that Perl is more readable
than its counterpart.

--Testing and Documentation.--

Perl and Ruby both provide excellent testing and documentation
facilities. Where Perl has POD, Ruby has RDoc. Where Perl has
Test::More, Ruby has test/unit. Both are invaluable tools if used
properly, and it's worth taking the time to get to know how to used
them.

--Community Support--

There is no CRAN, and there are no Ruby Monks. That's not to say that
Ruby doesn't have it's own module system (rubygems.org), but it's
nowhere near as robust as CPAN. Likewise, I managed to find some folks
to answer questions I had in irc, but Perl monks it is not.

This is, I think, a reflection of the relative maturity of Perl to Ruby.
With a decades long head-start, Perl has grown a community of
developers; many of whom have been willing and eager to post the best of
their libraries for others to use. It's those same developers that can
lend their time and expertise to those of us who might not know any
better. Ruby has neither of these things because it hasn't been around
long enough. Given another decade, that may change.

--Conclusions--

Ruby is an excellent language, and I'm interested/eager to learn more
about it. With a variety of Ruby related modules on CPAN,
interoperability between the two languages doesn't appear to be out of
the question. It seems to me that Ruby will make a better choice for OOP
when it's called for, and can be an excellent way of rapid prototyping
class hierarchies before developing them in another OO language.
<P>
That said, I've always believed that the strength of any organization is
in its people. Perl provides the model of a development community that
other languages strive for, and as a result, when I'm presented with a
task that seems unusual, awkward, or that requires fitting the square
peg in the triangular hole, Perl will continue to be the natural choice.

--Further Reading--
 * http://use.perl.org/~jmcada/journal/32457
 * Thomas, Dave. "Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide."
Pragmatic Programmers, LLC. Raleigh, 2005.
 * Introduction to Ruby for Perl Programmers

Originally posted on PerlMonks at http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=689996
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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.