I think the consistency comes down to how many
different ways there are to do things. That makes
it more difficult to master the idioms, because
different code does similar things in different ways.

But there is a /huge/ plus for Ruby that is lurking
in the background. After spending the weekend at the
SDForum's Ruby conference, the meta-message for me
was that Ruby was great at building a /language/
geared towards solving a particular set of problems.

In standard terminology, they're known as Domain Specific
Languages. But I prefer to think of them as Design
Solution Languages.

Not since Forth have I seen a language in which it
was so easy to create a problem-specific vocabulary.
I used to wish for a Forth with C-style syntax. (I
didn't know enough to wish for OO-ness back then.)
It turns out that Ruby is it.

So my pick would be Ruby for the promise of huge
vistas of opportunity that will open up once you scale
the learning curve and reach the peak of the mountain.

(When I manage to get there, I'll tell how the view is.)
:_)


John Gabriele wrote:
> On 4/27/06, John Gabriele <jmg3000 / gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 4/26/06, Alan M <nospam / hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am a Linux administrator and I use Perl for scripting.
>>> I do not develop any web applications. My programs are command line
>>> tools.
>>>
>>> At this phase I am thinking to upgrade my programming language to either
>>> Python or Ruby.
>>>
>>> Considering the fact that I won't develop any web application, Which one
>>> would be a better choice for me Perl or Ruby?
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>> Alan
>>>
>> They're both good choices. I'm fairly new to Ruby, but here's my 2 cents.
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> Plusses for Ruby:
>> - Ruby seems a little more tailored for admin work than Python (since
>> Ruby has built in regexes, easy stdin/stdout)
>> - RDoc (documentation for your scripts comes right from plain old
>> comments above the thing they're documenting).
>> - Personally, I prefer its (Perl-like) string handling to Python's.
>>
>> Minuses for Ruby:
>> - Lack of docs (good printed books though)
>>
> 
> By the way, there are, of course, other plusses for Ruby that are
> relevant if you're looking at it for other uses besides system
> administration.
> 
> Also, Ruby's a very consistent language too (dunno why I only
> mentioned this for Python above -- they're both pretty
> self-consistent).
>