Should I Learn Perl or Ruby?

Should I learn Perl or Ruby?

Perl has a stronger user community. Perl’s modules are worth a fortune.

Ruby is famous for its gems.

Perl has a longer history, so you are more likely to find an existing code module to do what you need to do. You’re less likely to reinvent the wheel.

Ruby has more functionality to allow you to develop new code more efficiently.

Perl has a lot of different ways to solve a problem, but that can make figuring out the logic flow of someone else’s code a problem.

Golang automatically creates documentation based on programmer comments.

Given how sparse, mocking or profanity laced most user comments are, I wouldn’t advise that function be used in any language. But Perl requires so much commenting to explain that you might as well be writing a book on the software app as you write the app.

That creativity would be better served in graphic arts, not coding.

Perl’s diverse problem solving methods mean you have to do a lot of documentation or you might not be able to figure out what you did six months later.

Perl’s weakness is its syntax. Or, rather, the hardest part of the language.

Whereas Ruby is famous for its human readable code.

People still have to read it.

Ruby does have the advantage of being designed for object oriented architecture. Perl had to adapt to OOP.

Why is Ruby so popular?

It lets a bunch of programmers in Silicon Valley whip out apps and framework.

So Ruby is popular because it is the language of the tech elite.

Kind of like French being the language of culture in the 1700s and why a butler with a British accent today gets 10K more than his American counterpart.

It sounds like I need to know Ruby if I’m going to work at a startup.

And for darn near everything else, learn Perl. It runs the enterprise wide apps and engineering software that powers the economy.