use Perl

"not sure the story could have carried it without the amazing effects though"

Sorta like Star Wars? Or The Matrix? Or most any great sci-fi movie? I guess I don't really understand the criticism.

I gave up on grep -r a while ago, even on platforms that supported that option, because it just didn't work the way I wanted it to or, in some cases, at all.

Ack is definitely the way to go.

I hereby second this rant.

use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::*;

What, too Java?

"Perl doesn't scale" these days probably refers to the lack of native thread support and/or lack of SMP support.

tests not run by default when you install

Might not be a good idea: http://blog.urth.org/2009/05/the-real-problem-with-dependencies.html

They can be run explicitly, though. And, they can be run after they're installed. I don't know how to do that with cpan.

lots of gems now on github and dont make it to rubyforge

You can add github as a gem source so it will automatically look there.

people have personal gem repos which you have to use sometimes.

I repeat, you can add a source. And that's not an issue unique to Ruby. I don't see some of Dave Roth's stuff on CPAN for example.

up until gem1.3 installs would use a gig of ram

Good thing most people have upgraded then, eh? And it really depended on how many gems you had installed.

Also, I miss sane session handling on use.perl. Gah!

This blog article from Chad Fowler may interest you:

http://www.chadfowler.com/2009/7/8/how-ruby-mixins-work-with-inheritance

This post may be of interest to you:

http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2006/9/22/inspecting-a-live-ruby-process

Be sure to follow the comments, too.

It's not greater, it's just different. The problems you mention will be caught in about 0.1 seconds with any kind of reasonable test suite.

My observations over many years are that the only people who have problems with the lack of strict variables are Perlers who are new to Ruby, and who are still writing monolithic top-down scripts. It's really a non-issue in practice. Running with -w helps, too. It sure beats the heck out of typing 'my' everywhere.

Amy Hoy is speaking at a Perl workshop? I didn't know she did Perl.

Yeah, it would be nice if RF integrated it somehow. There are other places you can look, though:

http://allgems.faithpromotingstories.org/gems

Also, with many Ruby projects on github, you at least get the README up front.

I'll be curious to see how much github affects CPAN in the long term.

At Qwest we had a snapshot of the production database for people to run reports off of. It had a few limitations (you couldn't snap some of the larger field types), but it worked pretty well.

Also, with Oracle you can set IO limits on a per account basis, so queries like the one you mention would simply timeout after a while.

Does MySQL provide such features?

It was just an alert. Don't read too much into it.

Matt's talk was tame compared to this Flash conference incident.

Don't make the Ruby community angry, or Mad Matz and Tina Turner will come after you!