A Perl of Great Price

Posted by Rick DeNatale Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:03:18 GMT

An old programming adage goes: “You can write Fortran in any language.”

Computer languages, like natural languages, tend to spawn their own cultures and religions. And it’s not unexpected that the groups associated with these have different slants on things.

One of Ruby’s strengths is that it stole from the best. When I look at the language, it feels like Matz took the best features from a variety of languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, and not the least, Perl.

Two great features which Ruby inherited from Perl are integral support for regular expressions, and Perl’s excellent statement modifiers which allow things like: 
if test
   statement
end
to be replaced with the more succinct and usually clearer: 
statement if test
However, IMHO, overuse of the Perl features in Ruby can make code too Perl-like.

I’ve seen my share of Ruby code which is hard-to read and understand, and a lot of that looks suspiciously like Perl code re-written in Ruby.

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