Random Perl ... rant

[James Laver]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Nigel Rantor <wiggly at wiggly.org> wrote:
> Ovid wrote:
>
> >
> > 1.  Ruby is a nicer language than Perl, but the community is young and
> > making silly mistakes.  Their love of modifying core classes/modules in
> > incompatible ways is powerful, but hitting their scalability limits. Just
> compare newer Perl code with Perl code written only five years
> > ago.  We've grown up quite a bit.  When Ruby grows up, they're going to
> > be a serious contender.
> >
>
>  I have started using ruby seriously on some stuff now rather than just for
> random scripting and yes, it is most definitely nicer.
>
>  The mindset is a lot closer to mine than Perl is.
>
>  I love Perl, but after using Ruby I might not be using it for my own
> projects anymore, it may become a £ only language, like Java...which is sad
> (to me).
>
>   n
>
>  p.s. See how none of the above was ranty, just really a little melancholy?
>

For most developers, I would imagine that while the money is good, it
is _not_ the primary reason for programming in Perl.

While ruby is nice if you like that sort of thing, it lacks a certain
level of expressiveness for some problems which are more ideally
suited to perl. Oh, and it's slow

I played with ruby for a long time, but in the end I came back to perl.

Use the right tool for the job.

--James