We're going to be doing some system administration types of tasks on linux servers, and I'm looking into the pros and cons of using ruby vs. perl for this.
First off, the main concerns are programmer efficiency and ease of maintenance. The runtime speed differences between ruby and perl are much less of an issue. I have done ruby programming and do enjoy its expressive elegance. I've seen some perl and it seems, er, less so. On the other hand, doing some initial looking around, it seems that CPAN (and just the larger experience/usage base in general) might be advantages over ruby and gems. Whether or not that's true, and whether or not that makes up for the cleanliness of ruby is one of the things I'm wondering. I'd love to hear the thoughts of anyone who has tried to do sysadmin types of scripting, account creation, interfacing with the OS, etc with perl and ruby and can offer any insights. We need to stick with standard, supported rpms, so it looks like that's currently 1.8.5 on centOS and perhaps 1.8.7 on Ubuntu. Thanks for any thoughts! -glenn -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
