Anyone here have comments on Ruby?

I like it. I like it a lot. I still spend most of my day with Perl 5 since that's what most of the rest of the world is using. However I think I'll end up more productive in Ruby than in Perl 5 with a little more effort on my part.

Until Perl 6 hits the streets (and possibly afterwards - who knows), or the world finally realises what nice languages Lisp and Smalltalk are, Ruby is a darn fine language.

To be honest I've not found it that much of a mental clash with Perl 5. The only mistakes I commonly make are adding/forgetting the $ prefix in Ruby/Perl, and a tendency to mix up def/sub.

If one wants real OO, but not some sort of heck, Ruby is much nicer. But OO is not always that important.

If one wants real OO, but not some sort of heck, Ruby is much nicer. But OO is not always that important.

True, but Ruby doesn't force you to write in an OO style any more than Perl does.

That's really my concern about getting into Ruby -- the semantic clashes with perl syntax, as well as possible addiction.

Syntax might be a little bit confusing for a while, but it usually gets settled quite quickly. Besides, you always have samples (your old code) handy. Really there is not much worry.

As for "as well as possible addiction", why is it a problem? Doesn't matter whether it is Perl or Ruby, the one makes you an addict, is the best for you. When one person finds that Perl is the best, the other guy may feel comfortable with Ruby the most. You liked beer for quite a long time, suddenly one day you started to drink wine more and more. Beer is good, and wine is also good, enjoy whatever you like. Maybe one day you will come back to beer.

I don't know, but I bet Robert Parker doesn't drink beer on weekends. Even if he liked it, too much risk of screwing up his palate -- wine is his professional life.

Now, I'm no Robert Parker of perl, but you get the idea -- the tools you need to earn a living need to be kept sharp, vocation vs. avocation.

It would be quite a large problem for almost anything real-life related.

Ruby GEMS are nowhere near CPAN's breadth, how would you feel when you discovered that your language of choice needs creating from scratch SSL bindings, jabber, MS SQL library, bittorent etc etc?

It's not important as long as you're living close to university, but these days, when protocols are as complicated as bittorent's or skype's, you have very little choice.

Some people say Haskell is great "faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP." , I found scheme quite to my liking, but if I would like to replace perl with them, I would have to start with taking few years off, to recreate important parts of perl toolkit.

I have had the experience you fear, but the other way round.

Way back when, my primary languages were C and TCL - I had been working on a large TCL project for about 18 months when it was abruptly canned, coincidentally shortly after I'd started delving into Perl a bit in my spare time.

During the next 12 months I hardly touched TCL, and wrote mostly C and Perl. Then I needed to automate a remote process, and wanted to use Expect for it. Everything went fine until I needed a regular expression - not a problem, I'd been churning the things out with ease just 12 months earlier, except now I found that I couldn't work out how to escape it. Not even with the manual in front of me. My brain simply didn't want to take it.

I spent about a day fighting the dang thing, then decided life was too short, gave up, and did it another way. I've tried to use Expect a couple of times in the 8 years since, with much the same results.

I still believe TCL is a fine language, and maybe when Perl5/6 and Parrot are a reality I'll be able to play with it once more, knowing that I have the freedom to skip out to Perl when I need a regexp.

Hugo

I had similar feeling when tried regular expressions in Tcl, and it is a reason why I am not fluent in Tcl. "regexp" in Tcl is not a strong part: difficult to use and not as fast as Perl's one.

I can't explain strength of Tcl even to myself, but it certainly possesses some wisdom that lacks in Perl: GUI made extremely easy to use there; it is somehow possible in Tcl and impossible in Perl.
In Perl, complexity grows when module grows, whereas Tcl manages things to remain simple to use, somehow, even when behaviour is no more simple. How Tcl does that - I can't understand.

That is why I use Tcl::Tk whenever I use GUI, and I quite often go to pure Tcl when create GUI

Of course everyone is different, but I've always found that learning a new language gives me insights into the ones I already know. Fairly often, something I found tricky difficult to understand, becomes clearer when I encounter it in another language. I haven't yet found that I lose anything by adding to my knowledge. YMMV, of course...

My brain is over 50 years old... I don't remember if it's relevant.

Played with Ruby a little bit. I have to be honest that I have never tried it before today.

It is quite a nice language in terms of OO and simplicity. Remind you of SmallTalk.

Just like any other languages, you might quickly find things that you don't like when you are finding things that you appreciate. It bothers me that Ruby does not support overloading of method. For example,

class A 
    def initialize(attr1) 
        @attr1 = attr1
    end
    def initialize(attr1, attr2) 
        @attr1 = attr1
        @attr2 = attr2
    end
    def tell()
        puts @attr1
    end    
end

class B < A 
    def tell(blah)
        puts "blah"
    end    
end

b = B.new("a", "b")
b.tell()
[download]

This does not work, and complains that I passed 0 parameters to tell(), when it requires 1 parameter. So the one in subclass overwrites the one in super class.

But do those two initialize methods in class A both work? No, only the second one works. Basically, it does not support overloading, or put in this way, the signature of the method does not consider the parameter list, but only the name.

At the beginning, I thought that was bad that the method was overwritten and there was no warning, or error. Than my Perl knowledge comes in ;-) I ask myself "why not try to run it with ruby -w", maybe it has the -w switch just like Perl? That worked! and told me "warning: method redefined; discarding old initialize". So it does not supoprt overloading, but at least warns ;-)

Remind you of SmallTalk.

...

It bothers me that Ruby does not support overloading of method.

As I remember, Smalltalk doesn't support method overloading in the way you describe either, so...

tell

is distinct from

tell:

Overloading methods by varying the parameter signatures is handy, but is only one way of approaching the problem. Incidentally, languages such as Perl, Python, Smalltalk (and I presume, Ruby) also won't distinguish different method signatures by their parameter types (to my knowledge), which some languages will...

if you're still being paid to work full time with Perl, you won't forget it :-)