I had a quick look at Ruby a little while ago. Now I know that it's unfair to make judgements about languages without using them in anger to actually *see* the benefits and costs. However what struck me at the time (and I think it's still kinda true) is that Ruby's did not offer clear benefits over the existing solutions.

For instance, take a look at Ruby's comparison page. It's improvements over Perl are: nicer syntax, different default scoping, cleaner integration of object-orientedness. The first two hardly make for a decisive argument. The OO integration model is nicer than Perl but I don't think that this alone make for a compelling argument to switch to Ruby.

I might be prejudiced here, but I basically believe that many who like Perl do so because it's a very free-form language, suitable for quick hacks. Thats my 2 cents anyway.

However as I mentioned at the top I have never taken a significant amount of time to try and implement anything in Ruby. What about anybody else? Does anyone with experience of Perl and Ruby want to share their feelings?

In reply to Re: One more perl programmer's take on Ruby (discussion) by snapdragon
in thread One more perl programmer's take on Ruby (discussion) by deprecated

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.