From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2004-01-30T01:27:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Project: in Ruby, Perl?

Alan Chen wrote:

>"Zach Dennis" <zdennis@mktec.com> wrote in message news:<LLENJLJKHAOFKOLPKLAFGEKBCAAA.zdennis@mktec.com>...
>  
>
>>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.
>>
>With an eye towards long term maintenance, the standard Ruby
>distribution is a lot smaller than a standard Perl dist. That makes it
>easier to install or build a custom production version, easier to
>archive, and you have a hope understanding it should you need to go
>digging into the depths to solve some issue.
>
This is also a con. Perl has lots of prewritten modules that will save 
you a great deal of work.

Need to validate an email address Email::Validate, need to check Country 
names Locale::Country, multipart email MIME::Lite, the list goes on. 
This is not to say that Ruby cannot do these things or that Ruby has no 
modules just that Perl has a lot of them. You can write quite 
significant amounts of functionality by downloading stuff from CPAN.

Of course if you don't need these modules then things become more equal, 
but if you are going to need these things then you have to ask yourself 
if you are willing to write virtually everything your require from 
scratch or do you just want to download it?

 From a commercial perspective CPAN is a big plus for Perl.
 From a coding point of view writting everything from scratch is a much 
more fun (for some value of fun).