[BioRuby] BioRuby Digest, Vol 50, Issue 1

[Yannick Wurm]

On 4 Nov 2009, at 18:00, bioruby-request at lists.open-bio.org wrote:

> I guess you mean this tongue in cheek. However, it is dangerous as it
> may turn off users looking to start with Ruby or Perl. So let me state
> I think there is plenty of hope for Ruby. You are talking execution
> speed of 'simple' oneliners. For complex programming Ruby outspeeds
> Perl, usually in practise. Particularly the speed of getting things
> done, but also a cleaner way of programming helps create better code.
> The end result will often be faster. And the third gain is in the code
> maintenance cycle. I am talking from experience here. I have written
> a lot of code in both languages (and Python too).

Those are excellent points, Pjotr.



> Perl6 is getting interesting. The syntax is much cleaned up, proper
> OOP, and (what I like) strong functional programming support. But its
> execution speed is not even close to Ruby's now. I have heard people
> joke that Ruby is what Perl6 was meant to be.
>
> Anyway you can see where the Perl folks are heading.

Yes, Damion Conway of Perl Best Practices gave us a small workshop  
recently, and I could help but thinking that Perl6 was an attempt to  
rubify perl :)

> P.S. What is there to stop you from using both languages?

Nothing official. But I already find it difficult to keep the R, bash  
and ruby parts of my brain optimized without mixing in perl and  
others :)

Cheers,
yannick