From: Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom@...>
Date: 2008-06-05T21:39:12+09:00
Subject: Re: A crosspost from the Perl Community

"Star Cross" <starx@axisoftime.com> wrote in message 
news:35db1cb396d98e77362722b737b4ccf5@ruby-forum.com...
> 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:
[ SNIP ]
> --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.
[ SNIP ]

Good post. I too am Perl first, having started with Perl 4 back in the early 
'90's. Perl really set the tone for infrastructure - you mention CPAN, but 
POD and the classic mechanics of Perl modules also stand out.

I'd agree with you, having started to use Ruby some in this past year or so. 
For OOP I think I'd go with Ruby. Interestingly enough I do not believe I 
would have adopted this viewpoint until having used "clean" OOP languages 
like Java or C#...Perl 5 was my second OOP language after C++ (well, really 
the third if one considers Prograph), and so after C++ I certainly didn't 
think of Perl OOP as being particularly cumbersome. :-)

For most scripts I'd still use Perl. A matter of familiarity more than 
anything else.

AHS