September 17, 2007 – 10:40 pm
In parts one and two I took a look at the differences and similarities between Ruby and Perl, and I think I owe it to everyone to publish a brief conclusion. My basic feeling is that while Ruby is a fantastic language, the following are a few reasons I won’t be abandoning Perl any time soon.
Proven track record
Perl has been in serious use since before Ruby was even a murmur on the internet. It has a long history of serving its purpose well and quite a list of accomplishments: everything from powerful, dynamic websites to utilities supporting the daily operations of large companies. Its performance and reliability have been proven over and over again.
Open source community and CPAN
The Perl community is active, friendly, and full of very intelligent people. As evidence of that I submit the CPAN, the Perl Mongers groups that can be found around the globe, and the different Perl mailing lists that gladly offer help to anyone seeking it.
mod_perl
Anyone who has used mod_perl can attest to the flexibility and power it gives developers. I have been involved in using it as a platform to seamlessly integrate custom Perl authentication and navigation with third-party, closed-source web applications written in completely different languages. Mod_perl is a serious tool that I would have a very difficult time leaving behind.
September 17, 2007 – 10:07 pm
In part one I started talking about a few differences between Ruby and Perl. Let’s continue with a few other topics I think are key to understanding both of these languages.
Object-Oriented programming
Most everyone these days does it, though some will argue what “it” really is. There are clear benefits, regardless of the specifics of your definition, and the vast majority of modern languages support writing Object Oriented code in one form or another. Ruby, as with a few other languages (notably, Python), takes OO to the extreme — everything is an object. Even the most simple code contains objects. Care to guess how many objects this line contains?
['a', '2', 'Z'].join(',')
Read More »
September 11, 2007 – 12:12 pm
I found this charting tool on Technorati today and thought it was an interesting way to quantify the buzz surrounding different keywords. For fun I’ve included a few charts here, comparing Perl and Ruby. It will be interesting to see how these change over time.
Blog posts in English per day over the past 30 days
Observations
At the time of this post, there is a slight difference in scale between the Perl and Ruby charts — Ruby averages just a bit more than what Perl manages. Keep in mind this is only counting blog postings, so things like IRC and mailing list traffic are left out. There are other factors, too, such as the possibility that Ruby programmers are simply more vocal or more likely to have a blog.
Also note the marked increase in Perl posts around August 11th as Kirrily Robert pointed out in the comments. Also thanks to Kirrily for recommending a change to the keywords to include “programming”.
And as a final note, I’m not sure how reliable this information is. The chart seems to occasionally be missing some information, such as a section of time with no data. So ignore that if it comes up.
Take action!
The take-away of all of this, I suppose, is that we should be are being more vocal. Perl is an excellent and powerful programming language with a huge base of users. And did I mention we get CPAN and Catalyst? So get to Good work, Perl users — spread the word!
September 8, 2007 – 10:27 pm
We had the distinct pleasure this past Friday at our monthly Perl Mongers meeting of having Jonathan Rockway present an introduction to the Catalyst web application framework. It was great to have one of our neighbors from the windy city make the journey up to Grand Rapids — many thanks, Jonathan.
For those who haven’t heard of Catalyst, I highly recommend taking a look. Just please don’t call it Rails for Perl. That would be selling it far too short.
One of the things that I love about Perl, and I know I’m not alone, is the flexibility of the language and supporting libraries (TIMTOWTDI, see CPAN). That same flexibility is also quite intentionally found in the Catalyst framework. Don’t like Template::Toolkit? No problem! Pick another like, Template::Declare, HTML::Template, Mason, or write your own. Don’t want to use one of the available ORMs? Fine, use Catalyst::Model::DBI and just write your SQL. You don’t even have to use a database if you don’t want to — see Catalyst::Model::SVN, Catalyst::Model::JabberRPC, and Angerwhale for examples. Talk about possibilities!
So take a look, you owe it to yourself. Install it, put it through its paces, and spread the word!
September 3, 2007 – 12:03 pm