Re^3: Ruby Before Perl? Nah.

[Fletch]

Good points.

The wikipedia article I referenced says "Perl's runtime method call mechanism naturally supports duck typing.". The thing is I think people writing Perl don't tend to think "the duck typing way" (if one might posit such a thing) to the extreme that Ruby encourages it. Not to mention that if you really want to in Ruby you can individually override / extend a single instance at runtime to implement an interface if need be (of course with Moose and friends you can do similar in Perl, so . . . ).

And yes, there's overhead to the smalltalkesque everything's-an-object everything's-done-sending-messages model. Ruby's still got speed issues, but it's still got lots of elegant points. I'll often whip first passes of CSV munging together using Ruport because Ruport::Data::Table allows some really succinct code; if speed's an issue then it's time to drop back to Text::CSV_XS or Tie::Handle::CSV.

[chromatic]

The thing is I think people writing Perl don't tend to think "the duck typing way" (if one might posit such a thing) to the extreme that Ruby encourages it.

I find it more likely that the Perl community doesn't fall all over itself to drool all over itself and slap new silly names on decades-old techniques blatantly and obviously ripped from other languages as do some parts of the Ruby community.