On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 9:37 PM, John List <johnlist(a)gulfbridge.net> wrote:
So ... we've been talking about Perl and Python.
Does anyone have any
observations on how Ruby fits (or doesn't) into this picture?
-Can it be used for scripting (the original subject)?
Yes.
Ruby is an effective and concise language that has a good enough
filesystem API to be used for scripting. Its syntax is weird to an
eye familiar with C-style idioms, and surprisingly formally complex to
any eye (it isn't an elegant language with few special cases like Lisp
or whatever, it has quite a few oddities), but it is certainly a
language that some programmers seem to find friendlier and more
natural in many contexts than C, Python or Perl.
-Is it as C-compatible as Python?
No idea. I've only ever dealt with Ruby in single-language web applications.
Chris