First I am not completely buying the "rewritten them in Ruby in something like 1/10th to 1/20th the lines". But I will give you the benefit of doubt since I don't know ruby.
I do know Perl thought, and I also know few other languages, including say Groovy.
And while there certain tasks which can be expressed in Groovy better, there are also others who are better expressed in Perl! And I think it would be the same for Ruby!
Ultimately, Perl, Groovy and Ruby all fall under the same category and are more or less the same type of things!
Perl is still a very good choice for code creation and software developed because: 1) It has very competitive feature set 2) Huge library set 3) The best community 4) It is still evolving
I am sure we can almost do a s/Perl/Ruby on this post and it would still make sense.
People who are defending Perl do so, because they want it to grow, and as Perl grow they grow with it. If you have ever been passionate about anything, you should understand where the people who defend Perl come from!
I do know Perl thought, and I also know few other languages, including say Groovy.
And while there certain tasks which can be expressed in Groovy better, there are also others who are better expressed in Perl! And I think it would be the same for Ruby!
Ultimately, Perl, Groovy and Ruby all fall under the same category and are more or less the same type of things!
Perl is still a very good choice for code creation and software developed because: 1) It has very competitive feature set 2) Huge library set 3) The best community 4) It is still evolving
I am sure we can almost do a s/Perl/Ruby on this post and it would still make sense.
People who are defending Perl do so, because they want it to grow, and as Perl grow they grow with it. If you have ever been passionate about anything, you should understand where the people who defend Perl come from!