From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2004-01-29T23:35:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Project: in Ruby, Perl?

Zach Dennis wrote:

> Hi,

Moin!

> 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.

When doing OOP in Perl, you have to do mostly everything yourself. (Just
take a look at constructors or methods calling overridden ones when
multiple inheritance is used.) Added user complexity aside this this
would theoretically give you more power, but Ruby's model is composed of
so simple and general rules that you can practically do everything you
could do in Perl.

Another thing worth noting is that all of Perl's built-ins aren't real
objects while in Ruby everything really is an object. (It will be hard
to add methods to numbers, strings or arrays in Perl.)

I've also felt that Perl projects get way harder to maintain after time.
I have the feeling that I can't refactor Perl code as Ruby code.

Oh, and references in Perl are one thing that was done way to complex.
Why isn't it possible to return an Array from a sub? When do you use
('a', 'b') and when ['a', 'b']? Would you want to use references for
complex structures? Will not using or using references get you into
trouble when doing serialization? What about dereferencing complex
things? Do you really want that? (This is the main reason of me
replacing Perl with Ruby as my primary programming language.)

There are also lots of smaller reasons like -> not looking as nice as .,
Ruby having setter and getter methods that look just like variable
getting and setting, and more stuff like this.

Just a few opinion pieces. Remember: This is all subjective!

> Thanks,
> Zach

Regards,
Florian Gross