> > > > Here is my question, is it really worthwhile to look at Perl now? I > > understand that different languages would induce different kind of > > thinking about programming problem. But I would probably look at > > Haskell, and/or Erlang for that purpose than Perl. > > > > So I am wondering what are the voids in Ruby that could be ably filled > > by Perl. The answer to this could motivate me to learn Perl. > > > > Your opinions welcome. > > > > The pattern matching engine of PERL (NFA) is so sophisticated that > it beats a similar handwritten program in C. > > PERL's approach of using 'closures' for accomplishing object-orientedness > is a pragmatic one. > > The ROI provided by PERL beats Ruby any day, inspite of how the syntax > looks. >
Hi saifi, Thanks for the interesting post. I agree that syntactic sugar should not be the only criteria to compare/choose a language. I also agree that we need to choose the right language for the job. But I don't think I have the answer I am looking for. I am not deciding between Perl and Ruby. I am already sold out for Ruby. Please consider this. I already know Ruby to some extant. My regex knowledge is limited but sufficient for my purposes so far, that any basic pattern matching facility is good enough for me. Ruby regex support is not bad either. Sure there is something to learn from the way Perl solves some of the programming problems. But should a Rubyist (or a novice rubyist) spend his spare time in learning Perl, or should he better put that effort on something radically different like Lua, Haskell, and stuff assuming market demand is not a criteria? Sure perl is in my 'to-learn' list, but not at the beginning. Is there a compelling reason to bring it up the list? Regards, Ragu PS: You won't be off the mark if you say 'you could better put the time to write such posts in learning Perl' :-)
