Rant mode enabled :o)

I've dabbled with a lot of other languages myself, as I have no doubt that a lot of others who visit this site have... and I think that trying to say "one language is better than the other" is the equivalent of other oft-cited arguments such as "my OS is better than yours", "my editor is better than yours"... , even, "my car is better than yours" :o)

Why do I use Perl ? look here and also here... I think the key to being a good programmer/ computer scientist is to objectively evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the tool that you're looking at.. is Perl good in text processing ? sure.. so use it if you can, it will save you lots of time.. Some people had posted a node on writing threaded applications rwith Perl.. is Perl good for that ? no, not yet.. other languages are much further along threading than Perl is...

I firmly believe in trying to find out the best possible tool to use for the job... if that's Perl (and you'd be surprised perhaps, at how many times Perl comes out on top of the language pile for various jobs ;o) then that's how it is, and I'm glad I know Perl so I can use it.. As neshura points out in her home node, an Advanced 3d gaming engine is not really what you would want to be writing in Perl ;o), so then, by all means use something else...

So, I'd actually say, Ruby is good, I haven't played with it so much, but it has some nice features.. but one of the strengths of Perl is how easily it adapts strong features of other languages and makes them its own.. and Perl is evolving in its own right (a look at the Perl 6 RFCs should tell you this), so for a large subset of tasks, its just a matter of individual preference...

If it makes your life easier to do it in Perl, don't break your neck and imbibe excess caffeine to do it in something else... :o) but sometimes it just comes down to individual preference as to what you use.. and well, just because someone *likes* the language, that doesn't make it better than anything else, right ? ;o)

Rant mode off