{In a blatant attempt to gain XP} I will answer my own questions, having taken a 30 minute peek at Ruby and running a Hello, World! or two.

1) Ruby works on Windows-- the install is painless and includes Tk (better than ActivePerl, which requires additional work to get Tk). As with all claims to cross-platform functionality, this must be taken with a grain of salt. But I see no reason to consider it a better or worse language than others in this regard.

2) The Tk module. This is included in the binary installer for Windows-- and the example Hello World from the Tk chapter of the docs worked without a hitch. I assume it is similarly easy to crank this up on Linux.

3) The OO model looks insanely cool. While getting the basics of OO from Perl (with massive help from merlyn's perlboot), I get the sense that Perl 5.x.x has a rather cobbled together OO system (compared to what OO purists would like from an OO system, that is).

In reply to (ichimunki) Re x 2: One more perl programmer's take on Ruby (discussion) by ichimunki
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.