http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=369915


in reply to Re^3: So much like a natural language
in thread So much like a natural language

I'm not far enough up that curve to welcome a slide, but I know how you feel.

While Perl remains my language of choice, I did go off and learn Ruby. I highly recommend it, not that I want to try to use it at work, or supplant Perl, or even truly believe that it stands a chance against Perl and Python, but because there are some very, very nice things about that language, that made me think differently.

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Re^5: So much like a natural language
by japhy (Canon) on Jun 27, 2004 at 04:21 UTC
    I learned some Ruby. Enough to write some programs that I wish could be translated easily into Perl. ;) Then I got jealous, and cursed the name of Ruby

    One of the nicest features about Ruby is one of it smallest and perhaps least significant. That ending punctuation on methods is so visually appealing and powerful to me.

    str = orig.chomp; # chomp()s copy of orig, stores in str orig.chomp!; # chomp()s orig in-place
    That just floored me. I wrote one really dumb program that exploited that. I made chomp? that basically returned whether the string would be changed by chomping it. What a cool feature. And so tiny!
    _____________________________________________________
    Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a job (NYC-area)
    s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

      Very nice. What a sweet language. When I read the pickaxe book, I get these moments where I think Matz is one very gifted man.

      What a shame it is horribly outperformed by Perl. At least, it used to be. Maybe if/when it migrates over to the Parrot runtime...