The language you choose is somewhat dependent on the data you're working with. I don't find that Ruby or PHP are particularly good at dealing with XML. They're passable for data manipulation and migration, but I wouldn't use them to render large collections of structured XML data, like EAD or TEI collections, or whatever.
Ethan On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 8:52 AM, Jason Stirnaman <jstirna...@kumc.edu>wrote: > This is a terribly distorted view of Ruby: "If you want to make web pages, > learn Ruby", and you don't need to learn Rails to get the benefit of Ruby's > awesomeness. But, everyone will have their own opinions. There's no > accounting for taste. > > For anyone interested in learning to program and hack around with library > data or linked data, here are some places to start (heavily biased toward > the elegance of Ruby): > > http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Working_with_MaRC > https://delicious.com/jstirnaman/ruby+books > https://delicious.com/jstirnaman/ruby+tutorials > http://rdf.rubyforge.org/ > > Jason > > Jason Stirnaman > Digital Projects Librarian > A.R. Dykes Library > University of Kansas Medical Center > 913-588-7319 > > ________________________________________ > From: Code for Libraries [CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] on behalf of Joe > Hourcle [onei...@grace.nascom.nasa.gov] > Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2013 12:52 PM > To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] You *are* a coder. So what am I? > > On Feb 17, 2013, at 11:43 AM, John Fereira wrote: > > > I have been writing software "professionally" since around 1980 and > first encounterd perl in the early 1990s of so and have *always* disliked > it. Last year I had to work on a project that was mostly developed in > perl and it reminded me how much I disliked it. As a utility language, and > one that I think is good for beginning programmers (especially for those > working in a library) I'd recommend PHP over perl every time. > > I'll agree that there are a few aspects of Perl that can be confusing, as > some functions will change behavior depending on context, and there was a > lot of bad code examples out there.* > > ... but I'd recommend almost any current mainstream language before > recommending that someone learn PHP. > > If you're looking to make web pages, learn Ruby. > > If you're doing data cleanup, Perl if it's lots of text, Python if it's > mostly numbers. > > I should also mention that in the early 1990s would have been Perl 4 ... > and unfortunately, most people who learned Perl never learned Perl 5. It's > changed a lot over the years. (just like PHP isn't nearly as insecure as > it used to be ... and actually supports placeholders so you don't end up > with SQL injections) > > -Joe >
