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 > > >