From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2009-02-10T03:15:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs Perl performance

Robert Klemme wrote:
> Yes, you can program OO style in Perl and there is /some/ support for
> this - but it does not really give you much advantage over doing OO in
> C (yes, you can do that: even std libraries do it, see open and fopen
> et al).
>   

I haven't done enough C to say for sure, but I loved Perl's OO. There 
definitely seems to be more there -- inheritance via @ISA, constructors 
via bless -- and while some find it ugly to expose all the 
underpinnings, that is one thing I love about Perl.

It's also one of the same reasons I love Ruby -- I don't have to get my 
hands dirty.

Take the simplest example, a method. In Ruby, it'd be:

class  Foo
  def bar(arg)
    ...
  end
end

In Perl (and forgive my syntax, it's rusty), it'd be something like:

package Foo;
sub bar {
  my ($self, $arg) = @_;
  ...
}

Now, the Ruby version is much more readable to me, and much easier to 
work with. But there is something magical about the way the Perl version 
starts from even more basic primitives. Arguments are simply passed in 
as an array, which you can either unpack or not, as you like. The 
current object is passed in as an argument, meaning this is just another 
subroutine -- it lets you do tricks like this:

my $foo_like_thing = Bar::new();
Foo::bar($foo_like_thing, $some_other_arg);

Kind of like Javascript's call() and apply() -- and I'm not even sure 
this can be done in Ruby. For all the duck typing goodness, I can't seem 
to figure out how you'd unbind a method and rebind it to something of an 
unrelated class, unless there's an explicit tree of inheritance.

Not that this is something I've often (ever?) felt the need to do in 
Ruby. I'm just using it to illustrate what I like about Perl -- that 
it's so completely relaxed about this kind of thing. It gives you the 
bare bones of what's necessary for an object system, and you build 
whatever you want on top of it -- even with the guts exposed all over 
the place.

> IMHO the best arguments for Perl are these
> - often it's installed on a *nix system
> - CPAN

I'll agree with that. And for new projects, I will instinctively choose 
Ruby. But it's for other reasons -- I like Ruby's syntax, and I like 
everything being an object, and being able to do things like the Rails 
Object#blank? hack, and iterators, and...