From: Igor Pirnovar Date: 2009-02-10T06:34:30+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby vs Perl performance Chad Perrin wrote: > . . . > You talk as though Perl were something like Java or C++. It's not. > . . . I am saying nothing of that kind!? The fact that you are lumping Perl together with C++ and Java or Ruby for that matter speaks volumes, and I simply do not have time to debate this. But I can not allow myself not to reiterate that Perl is a procedural language, and that its OO capabilities do not impress me at all. OO in Perl is worse than C's GNOME extension. To use OOP in Perl is just not worth the trouble. I also love Perl but not for it's OOP but rather that for which it was designed in the first place, which is procedural stuff and efficient shell programming that is almost as powerful as C. However, there are times when even Perl is too convoluted and a simple Unix shell script will do much better. At the same token I believe, that to use Ruby as a replacement for shell script as many use Perl, is a brain damaging proposition. The bottom line is Ruby is an OOPL and is the most powerful in this domain. With Ruby, scripting is just an additional bonus, and is not at all what it was designed for. Arguably Ruby is one of The Best OOPLs, and as I have already said nothing so far comes close to it, let alone Perl which is nothing more than super duper scripting language, with a bonus to wrap it in a reasonable OO paradigm, which, by the way, is rather poorly understood by those who use Perl the most. Using Perl on large projects is no longer a desirable enterprise, though in the past it used to be a knockout when it competed with C. With the advent of OO, Perl had to be tweaked to provide this alternative, however that alternative sucks, and that is why Python took over its domain. Thankfully, Ruby was born to replace these OO concoctions that I cherish only as interesting OO fossils. On the other hand, what is good and healthy lives long, and I believe procedural Perl will never die. Though with some effort you can do anything you could do in Perl also in Ruby. But isn't that true for all programming languages. This is known since the 60's when COBOL programs were sprinkled with Assembler procedures. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.