The language you choose is somewhat dependent on the data you're working
with.  I don't find that Ruby or PHP are particularly good at dealing with
XML. They're passable for data manipulation and migration, but I wouldn't
use them to render large collections of structured XML data, like EAD or
TEI collections, or whatever.


Ethan


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 8:52 AM, Jason Stirnaman <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> This is a terribly distorted view of Ruby: "If you want to make web pages,
> learn Ruby", and you don't need to learn Rails to get the benefit of Ruby's
> awesomeness. But, everyone will have their own opinions. There's no
> accounting for taste.
>
> For anyone interested in learning to program and hack around with library
> data or linked data, here are some places to start (heavily biased toward
> the elegance of Ruby):
>
> http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Working_with_MaRC
> https://delicious.com/jstirnaman/ruby+books
> https://delicious.com/jstirnaman/ruby+tutorials
> http://rdf.rubyforge.org/
>
> Jason
>
> Jason Stirnaman
> Digital Projects Librarian
> A.R. Dykes Library
> University of Kansas Medical Center
> 913-588-7319
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Joe
> Hourcle [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2013 12:52 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] You *are* a coder. So what am I?
>
> On Feb 17, 2013, at 11:43 AM, John Fereira wrote:
>
> > I have been writing software "professionally" since around 1980 and
> first encounterd perl in the early 1990s of so and have *always* disliked
> it.   Last year I had to work on a project that was mostly developed in
> perl and it reminded me how much I disliked it.  As a utility language, and
> one that I think is good for beginning programmers (especially for those
> working in a library) I'd recommend PHP over perl every time.
>
> I'll agree that there are a few aspects of Perl that can be confusing, as
> some functions will change behavior depending on context, and there was a
> lot of bad code examples out there.*
>
> ... but I'd recommend almost any current mainstream language before
> recommending that someone learn PHP.
>
> If you're looking to make web pages, learn Ruby.
>
> If you're doing data cleanup, Perl if it's lots of text, Python if it's
> mostly numbers.
>
> I should also mention that in the early 1990s would have been Perl 4 ...
> and unfortunately, most people who learned Perl never learned Perl 5.  It's
> changed a lot over the years.  (just like PHP isn't nearly as insecure as
> it used to be ... and actually supports placeholders so you don't end up
> with SQL injections)
>
> -Joe
>