There several things missing in ruby compared to perl that limit my desire to go to that language.

One thing I miss is the amenities to reduce the amount of quoting the user has to do when using hashes. Compare: 

h = {"one"=>1, "two"=>2, "three"=>3 }
h["four"] = 4

[download]

to this in perl: 

%h = (one=>1, two=>2, three=>3);
$h{four} = 4;

[download]

You can tell perl was written by a linguist -- there's more interest in making the language expressive, with natural shortcuts, rather than "pure."

Being able to convert input strings to numbers instantly is another nice shortcut. "Everything's an object" gets in the way of that in ruby.

The worst thing is the complete lack of a protective mode like "use strict;" as I discussed here. Writing in ruby feels unsafe to me.

Perhaps I am spoiled by some of the features in perl. If I had started first with ruby I might like it better.

In reply to Re: Perl/Ruby comparison by tall_man
in thread Perl/Ruby comparison by srdst13

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.