in reply to Re: Perl to Ruby translator?
in thread Perl to Ruby translator?

I've used, taught, and advocated Perl for several years, and will continue to do so. I toyed with Ruby two years ago, came back to it a year ago, and now choose to implement most of my personal projects in Ruby. It is concise, expressive, and flexible, and while its RAA isn't as developed as CPAN, it does have nearly 1,000 application/library packages many of which are quite mature (and libs for ftp,http,stmp,pop,telnet,webrick,yaml,xml, among others are included as part of Ruby's standard library). It also has flexible iterators, and you can iterate over multiple Enumerable objects already :-)

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Re^3: Perl to Ruby translator?
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Oct 11, 2003 at 20:06 UTC

    What the AM said ;-)

    I've been learning Ruby on the side this year and it has been a most enjoyable process. Nice language. Well designed. Far fewer odd corners than Perl 5.

    I'm seriously considering using it for some commercial work if the opportunity arises.

    Only two downsides that I've encountered:

    1. The lack of CPAN. RAA is nice but not quite at the same level of utility yet. However, for many applications all you need is there.
    2. Speed. Its surprisingly slow. Again, not always a problem. Also, there is no real reason it won't get faster in time. It is, after all, just a trivial matter of programming :-)
[reply]
      Now, just imagine Parrot has matured and we have both Ruby-over-Parrot and Ponie. Guess what..? ;)

      Makeshifts last the longest.

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        Now, just imagine Parrot has matured and we have both Ruby-over-Parrot and Ponie. Guess what..? ;)
        By that time, I will be retired.

        Abigail

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      I found the speed difference between ruby-1.6.7 and perl-5.6.1 to be about 50% in favor of perl. But perl-5.8.0 is about 50% slower (perlio defined this time), and ruby-1.8.0 is about that much faster, so the difference now is only a few percent.
[reply]

        I have not had the time to play with 1.8.0 yet. I stand corrected.

        (see - it was a trivial matter of programming ;-)

[reply]

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