Re:Ruby for eBook Publishing
by benbristow on Monday September 20, 2021 @05:07PM
(#28599005)
I used to work somewhere where I got "forced" to use Perl but was more familiar with Ruby.
Obviously Perl came far earlier than Ruby and Ruby was heavily inspired by Perl (There's even a quick comparison on the official Ruby site here https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-l...) but it always felt like Ruby is such a nicer language to read and write and obviously due to age was just a more modern overall. You could define a class as a... class!
Whenever I wanted to make a quick script for myself for personal usage I'd always write it in Ruby.
I'm now in a C#/.NET role and love typed languages now but I'd never go back to Perl, but I still have a special spot for Ruby.
Perl got lost in arguments over whether to adopt a meta-object protocol (MOP) in the core and if so, which one. That and the endless variants of Moose just took TIMTOWTDI to ridiculous extremes. Meanwhile PHP and Rails were eating Perl's lunch.
ruby-packer worked for my little Ruby things in that regard https://nts.strzibny.name/making-a-ruby-executable-with-ruby...
I grew to love Ruby, though I admit I always approached it with half a mind pretending I was writing Perl.
These days I've sometimes fallen back into Ruby, but then had issues sharing it with colleagues - so I've largely switched to Go. While most people don't have a dev-environment setup I can give them binaries built via github/gitlab/jenkins, and so sharing tools & utilities is just that little bit less painful than with Ruby (and even Python).