John van Vlaanderen wrote:

# I'm a big perl person and have been trying to organize in NY.
# http://puny.vm.com
# 
# The perl mongers group has been incredibally weird, to say the least, 
and
# reports from everywhere else reflect intense concern about the future of 
perl.
# 
# I truly love perl, but I need a break.  I am very interested in 
developing the
# Perl6 documetation, bug tracking and QA systems, with an eye towards 
creating
# "emitters", html programming environments, and a host of commerical 
bases.
# 
# The biggest hurdle is getting acceptance in the software industry.  This 
has
# become impossible since the present "stable" is anything but and no 
Linux
# release will accept it. 

This last paragraph doesn't quite make sense to me. Is there a missing 
sentence somewhere?

# I need a break, so here I am.

Well, Ruby implements a break, so you've come to the right place. Welcome. 


# All I know about ruby is that I really like what I have seen.  I have a 
large
# perl project to finish, which may take forever, but maybe ruby may be a 
better
# way to go.

Hopefully so.

# I'm also a big KSH person, I'm actually hoping for an OO rewrite and 
loadable
# modules.  That would help in my industry greatly.

Not sure what you mean here. Presumably you already know about ksh93
and about (http://www.kornshell.com/) and (I think it might have been)
DGK's claim (to the effect) that ksh93i has enough of Perl's string
and OO features that they now mostly use ksh instead of Perl?

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)