If you're asking about the size of the user community and the freely available resources, there is no comparison. Despite the frequent blog postings, Ruby's user base remains very small. Perl is one of the most popular languages in the world, and CPAN is very large and useful. Some people may find Ruby's features more interesting, but it's still just getting started in terms of relative usage and the maturity of its CPAN-equivalent.

Which isn't to say that Ruby isn't ready to be used in the real world.

While the Ruby community is smaller than Perl's, it's active and helpful so you can get questions answered and problems solved.

Ruby itself has been around for a fair number of years and has been beaten up enough to have the rough edges knocked off. It's stable and works well in my experience.

RubyGems et al aren't as expansive as CPAN, but for a lot of the stuff I do it's reached the stage where the more complicated bits of what I need come off the shelf.

To be honest the only things I really miss in Ruby are the attention Perl module authors pay to documentation, I spend too much time in Ruby reading code, and Perl's testing framework. TAP and the Test:: modules rock :-)

In reply to Re^2: Perl/Ruby comparison by adrianh
in thread Perl/Ruby comparison by srdst13

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