An Architect's View

7 responses so far ↓

• 1 Steve Gustafson // Jan 20, 2006 at 6:16 PM

  Sean, I'm curious as to why you dislike PERL. I started out programming in PERL. I've been using ColdFusion for 10 years now, and do almost all my coding in CF.
  
  However, from time to time I run into situations where PERL is a significantly better choice for a task, so I still pull it out of my toolbelt periodically.
  
  I'm not trying to start a debate, I'm just curious as to why you dislike PERL.
  
  Gus

• 2 Sean Corfield // Jan 20, 2006 at 7:59 PM

  I find the syntax ugly and hard to read. I don't like terse, obtuse languages. It's just a personal preference. I generally don't like languages that use arbitary punctuation to introduce variable names, for example (Perl, PHP, Ruby...).

• 3 Aneesha // Jan 20, 2006 at 8:13 PM

  To be honest I would never have gotten into Ruby if Rails was not using it. Rails seems to be the Ruby killer app. The biggest selling point for me was the improved productivity and reduced no of lines of code. Momentum is definately with Ruby and Rails at the moment.

• 4 Scott Fanetti // Jan 21, 2006 at 12:14 AM

  I learned to program in Java so I tend to agree with Sean about the syntax annoyances of Perl or PHP. But after playing with Ruby on Rails for a while, I am hooked. The language develops a style and flow when you get to know it. I never really felt that way about visual basic code, either. Maybe I just had a poor understanding of the constructs, but I always thought VB made you go around your back to get to your elbow.
  
  I'm rambling. Goodnight.

• 5 Seth Petry-Johnson // Jan 21, 2006 at 6:25 AM

  I don't like the syntax of PHP either, I find it very hard to read. I haven't looked at Perl in quite some time, but I remember feeling pretty much the same way about it.
  
  I've only just begun looking into Ruby on Rails and so far it looks pretty cool. I haven't spent enough time on the Ruby language itself to really form an opinion though.

• 6 Robin Hilliard // Jan 21, 2006 at 3:07 PM

  Hey Sean,
  
  Not to keen on the $<, $@ etc myself but there is an 'English' module in Ruby that adds more verbose synonyms for the global $... variables.
  
  Of course you can write terse, hard to read gibberish in any language, in the second edition of the "Pickaxe" book there seems to be some efforts to encourage people away from the Perl-like aspects of the language

• 7 Brandon Ellis // Jan 21, 2006 at 5:53 PM

  I've been exploring Ruby for the last few weeks and for all the good I have found in the reduced coding, the klunkiness of the syntax has definitely turned me off. Not to mention that it doesn't generate standards based pages out of the box (what year is this again?).

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