Comment Re:Why Ruby? (Score 1) 199
As a Python programmer who learned Ruby to develop Rails applications, I have to agree. If you know some Perl and are happy with it, you will probably feel at home with a lot of Ruby's conventions. That being said, Ruby has some cool features language features that aren't in Perl or Python. (The code yielding stuff and passing code blocks, I'm thinking.)
If you don't like or know Perl and are happy with Python, it's probably not worth your time to learn Ruby unless there's some killer app you really want to play with (like Rails). To people like me with whom Perl never really clicked, certain conventions in Ruby might seem frustrating. (I'm looking at you, regex syntax! Instead of returning match values, let's put them in some arbitrarily named global variables! Yay!) They are both great languages, though, as long as you are willing to spend the time necessary to get to know them.
If you don't like or know Perl and are happy with Python, it's probably not worth your time to learn Ruby unless there's some killer app you really want to play with (like Rails). To people like me with whom Perl never really clicked, certain conventions in Ruby might seem frustrating. (I'm looking at you, regex syntax! Instead of returning match values, let's put them in some arbitrarily named global variables! Yay!) They are both great languages, though, as long as you are willing to spend the time necessary to get to know them.
