That's interesting that you should say that Joe.  That's one of the major
goals of the Hydra Project (http://projecthydra.org/), which is almost
entirely in Ruby.

-Justin


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 8:00 AM, Ethan Gruber <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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
> >
>