Chad, I generally agree, however...

2009/2/9 Chad Perrin <perrin / apotheon.com>:
> . . . but I really don't agree with your assessment of Perl's development
> cycle as something that "doesn't even come close" to Ruby's.
> Furthermore, pigeonholing Perl as a "procedural" language is as unfair to
> it as pigeonholing Ruby as "object oriented" is to Ruby.  Both of them
> have a lot more to offer.  Both provide excellent support for many
> traditionally functional paradigm programming; both support object
> oriented development;

... that statement makes me itch.  I try to avoid voicing extreme
opinions, but in this case I have to say: Perl's OO is a bad joke.
Yes, you can program OO style in Perl and there is /some/ support for
this - but it does not really give you much advantage over doing OO in
C (yes, you can do that: even std libraries do it, see open and fopen
et al).

> both can be used in a structured, procedural style
> when that's the appropriate technique to employ.

Right.

> In general, I enjoy programming in Ruby more, these days -- but there are
> tasks for which I'd much rather write the code in Perl than in Ruby.
> Each has its strengths, and each has its place in my development toolkit
> (and neither of them is clearly "faster" in terms of "the entire project
> life cycle", especially considering that different projects have very
> different lifecycles).

IMHO the best arguments for Perl are these
- often it's installed on a *nix system
- CPAN

Kind regards

robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end