[ruby-talk:6749] Re: My Perl to Ruby Story (was: perl and ruby)

> I've been using Perl for over 6 years and have been using it for most
> of my tool building software.  Although Perl is great for the quick,
> one-time scripts, I found myself becoming unsatisfied with it for
> larger, long term development.  Mostly I found it lack of (easy)
> support for abstractions to be the heart of my dissatisfaction.
> Arrays and hashs are great and can be used to solve almost any
> problem; but in the end, I want to write code in terms of the problem
> space, not entangled with the details of data representation.  Yes,
> you can create objects and abstractions in Perl, but the result is
> cumbersome and clumsy.

I have a similar experiecne. Although I am by far not a Perl expert,
I use it at work to do different tasks. often the result works, but looks
ugly. Okay, this can also be may fault (a bad programmer is much
worse than a bad language), but when I rewrite some of the
code in Ruby (or Python) it is much more readable.

I think Ruby is a good next step for the Perl Programmer.
The main disadvantage of Ruby is, that there is no CPAN for
Ruby. Perl has modules for everything, but hopefully, this will
change in the future, and then Ruby will change the world 
of scripting languages.

> This summer I picked up the "Pragmatic Programmer" book and really
> enjoyed it.  When I noticed one of the authors advocating Ruby (Dave
> Thomas on the XP list, IIRC) and decided to check it out.  I found it
> easy to transfer my Perl experience in to Ruby with very little
> effort.  It was a winner for me.

Although I am only learning Ruby right now, it is already a winner
for my (as is Python)

markus