From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2004-01-29T21:45:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Project: in Ruby, Perl?

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Zach Dennis wrote:

> Any particular reasons why or why not Ruby or Perl? We have a small list of
> pros and cons, but I thought I might get some more insightful answers here.

As a guy who made his living with writing lots and lots and lots of Perl 
from about 1994 to 2002, I'll give you my reason why I don't use it much 
anymore.

Ruby is cleaner, easier, less stressful, and faster for me to develop in 
than Perl.  I'm nowhere near as knowledgable about the ins and outs of 
Ruby, yet, the way that I was about Perl, but even early on when I was 
always looking things up my code came together faster and with fewer 
errors and much greater readability than it did with Perl.  So it was an 
easy switch for me.  The cons regarding the in some cases less than 
plentifully accessible documentation and the less mature stable of 
contributed code, for me, is secondary to the fact that I can get more 
done in less time more easily and with greater readability in Ruby than I 
can in Perl.

Matter of fact, the only place where I regularly use Perl anymore is when 
maintaining some legacy code that was written in Perl (but which is going 
to be replaced by a new version of the software written in Ruby and using 
Iowa) and when I do the following sort of thing:

perl -p -i -e 's{foo}{bar}g' *

Just because the pattern is entrenched in my head as one my fingers pound 
out almost automatically, and doing that in Ruby just to use Ruby doesn't 
really get me any of the pros that are the reason why I use Ruby most of 
the time.


Kirk Haines