snacktime
8/17/2006 9:37:00 PM
On 8/17/06, Brian Hicks <bwhicks@aep.com> wrote:
> I'm looking to switch from perl to something more object oriented. I'm
> trying to decide between ruby and python, but I'm having some issues
> with some aspects of ruby. The language looks great to me, but I am
> interested in how it is extended (for things like network programming,
> oracle connectivity, extra fancy date manipulation, things like that).
> rubyforge seems to be the central location for these things, but it
> isn't entirely obvious how to get things installed properly or in a
> "standard" way, and if I did manage to get them installed, it's not
> obvious how to use them.
I found ruby fairly intuitive coming from a mostly perl background.
network programming is pretty easy. Database connectivity is pretty
good, although I haven't used the oracle adaptors. There is ruby-dbi
which is similar to perl dbi. The one thing I do miss is Date::Manip.
Nothing like it in ruby that I have found. Ruby regular expressions
aren't quite as powerful as perl's, but more then adequate. I do like
all the little methods in ruby that make doing the simple stuff easy,
like string.ljust, etc.. Some stuff takes a while to get used to
though, like the fact that everything is an object. Variable
assignment has it's quirks that have caught me a few times.
For things on rubyforge you can usually just 'gem install packagename'
from your local server and it will grab it from rubyforge and install
it. Stuff on raa you have to pull down and run 'ruby setup.rb'
yourself.
I've written a couple of decent sized apps in python and a ton of perl
code over the years, but the more i use ruby the more I like it.