in reply to A Perl vs. Java fight brews

<heresy>
If, as you say, your colleagues would need training whether you went for Perl or Java then perhaps it's worth considering something completely different.

Ruby has all of the advantages of a dynamic language and doesn't have the (largely undeserved) bad reputation that Perl has. Perhaps your colleagues would be more interesting in learning something new and exciting like Ruby rather than something old like Perl.

You'd still save the project from being implemented in Java and as a Perl programmer you'd almost certainly feel right at home with Ruby.
</heresy>

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<http://dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
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Re^2: A Perl vs. Java fight brews
by Moron (Curate) on Jul 24, 2006 at 14:50 UTC
    Unfortunately, I can't use your opinion in its summary form, I would need to present how Ruby matches up against the same checklist of technical features before I could it include it in the analysis - without that starting point I wouldn't know what to look for in the Ruby documentation when producing unbiased benchmarking code.

    -M

    Free your mind

[reply]

      Ruby is basically Perl 5, only the language has less syntax and is much more regular (so much so as to manage to make closures feel natural even to Java wussies), has clean and out-of-the-box-useful OO; but there is no CPAN for it.

      If I were to start over learning dynamic languages now, I would quite probably pick Ruby over Perl 5 – but I stick around because I already know Perl 5 very well, and Ruby doesn’t offer substantially more expressiveness and power.

      Ruby also has the advantage of being fresh and getting hyped right now, so might be an easier sell than the “crufty” and “write-only” (etc yadda yadda) Perl 5.

      Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]
        but there is no CPAN for it.

        To be fair there is less, rather than no CPAN. Ruby has Gems and there are more every day.

[reply]

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