Sunday, December 05, 2004

Ruby vs Perl

So this is the current dilemma I am having. There is this great language Perl and this other language Ruby. Some people have said that Ruby is a better Perl than perl. I'm not overly convinced. There are too many times that I'm looking at a project that I'm thinking about and I see that I can do it in Perl with a few modules and a little elbow grease.

Then I look at ruby.

Ruby has elegance. It has style and taste. Just not many modules. So I start to try and decide what to write. The only problem is that I tend to think that less code is better. Maybe it's a learning curve issue. The other conundrum is that I really want to take this app into Rails. It would really handy in terms of creation and shoot, things like BaseCamp were written in ruby. It's responsive and looks just all sorts of fast. Now with that said, maybe I'll just have to clamp down and write some stuff in ruby.

9 comments:

vevck said...

Ben! Thanks for the comparison.

Anonymous said...

I'm going throught the same thing. I don't see what the difference of developing an App in perl or Ruby.

You can use EMBperl for embedding the perl on an HTML and their are modules to speed the CGI process up right ?

Ruby seem's new and fancy, but can't perl do all of this ?

Ben said...

Well, as with any language, it's all what works in your head. I find that slurping everything in STDIN is easier to get in ruby than in perl. Sure you can embed perl, and you can even get servers that are optimised for perl cgi code, but if they do rails those items are already in as well.

Also, how readable is the code to you in a 6month time frame? If you finish a project and come back to it, is the perl understandable at first blush, or is the ruby?

Anonymous said...

thanks for your feeback, I'll think about that ;)

Anonymous said...

PERL man !!! I've done my research and perl has more power man. used with mod_perl, Mason, and some ajax (icing on the cake) you can't go wrong. check out the site's that use the technology:

http://www.masonhq.com/?MasonPoweredSites

Anonymous said...

To which I counter offer the rails sites, with Ajax built in as well:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RealWorldUsage

Anonymous said...

Ruby is not new. It has been around since 1993. Rails is fairly new but I am quickly falling in love with ruby.

Unknown said...

I was under same dillema
I am reading everywhere about Perl that "You can not read what you have written 6 months ago". I disagree with them. If your handwriting is not legible its not legible even now ,leave alone 6 months later .So no question of understanding the code yourself. Again if you want somebody else to read your code... I donot know...I had trouble reading some of the code written in C also. Its not in the code/language but the thinking,how a programmer thinks.

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