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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Ruby for Perl programmers 5 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only thing that stops me dumping perl entirely for ruby is maturity. If ruby had CPAN and all the oodles of modules (and I guess if I was as skilled in ruby as I am in perl) then it'd be byebye perl.

    Sadly [1] though perl's CPAN (which is mostly what keeps me here, but also the maturity of the perl development team - lots of people vs ruby's 1) is lightyears ahead of anything any other language could just come up with overnight now.

    [1] Only sad for the other l

    • Not that I wish to chase you away from Perl, but Brian Ingerson feels your pain and is working with others to create the FreePAN [freepan.org]. It's just started, most of the links are broken, but he does have Ruby content up there. In the process of creating that, he discovered that much of the Ruby Application Archive [ruby-lang.org] (RAA) consists of broken links (much like FreePAN, I suppose :) The RAA is actually just a bunch of somewhat organized links to the download pages for the programs. There's very little consistency and

      • The other pre-cursor to this is that Ruby has no standard installation procedure - almost every module does it differently. So there's no "perl Makefile.PL", there's no "h2xs" to create a standard module layout, there's no "make dist" so that all modules are created the same, etc.

        Until it has that sorted out, a CPAN for ruby is no better than RAA.

        But I believe it will get there eventually.
        • I feel your pain, but I can live with the installation issue. It's *usually* just a matter of reading the module's README, although I realize that the stuff most people come up with (including me) isn't very flexible. A couple folks from CORE (Colorado Ruby Enthusiasts) and myself plan on getting together to rework mkmf so that it works like Perl's MakeMaker. That's my plan, anyway.

          As for a Makefile.PL, the closest equivalent is the extconf.rb file, which does the "make", "make site-install" thing (assuming you've included mkmf), although it doesn't do "make test" at the moment; one of our first priorities is to autogenerate test targets if tests are included. Also, mkmf is only designed for extensions. At least, I've never tried it except for extensions, so this will probably be an even bigger project than I think it will be.

          • Learn from the past and don't "emulate MakeMaker". Writing out makefiles is dumb on many levels. First of Perl or Ruby is more than capable of doing everything make can do. And Perl (via File::Spec and others) has portability built in. I bet Ruby has some of that too.

            Furthermore, you can only guarantee that a user has Perl or Ruby installed, not make (especially on Win32), so why depend on an external program that offers very little not already available to you in the implementing language?

            See Perl's
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