Personally, I enjoy programming in both Ruby and Perl. I'm always amazed at how my Ruby programs seem to magically just work while Perl does *something* cool...but not always what I expected. I've used Perl on my job on occasion. I once wrote a message-oriented middleware system in Perl. But Ruby seems to be the future. I haven't used RoR extensively but I'd like to. I think Ruby and RoR would be best on your resume. Currently, part of my job involves using Groovy to do some mainframe screen-scraping and text manipulation. Groovy is fun because it's like Java (my usual language these days) but with all this crazy hotrod stuff tacked on. However, it takes me a lot of debugging to get things working - even worse than Perl. Hope some of this helped. -Brady On Oct 2, 2008, at 2:22 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu> wrote: > I want to spend some time learning a general-purpose interpreted > language. > I know a little Perl, but not a lot, and just a little Ruby. I've > also > used Octave/MATLAB and R/S fairly extensively, but those languages are > more special-purpose than general-purpose. > > I haven't really used other similar languages. Now I want to learn > one > and get good at it. What is the best choice? I want my choice to be > future-oriented. I can see why Perl is a good choice because of all > the > Perl code out there (especially in bioinformatics), but I'm > wondering if I > should learn Ruby instead of Perl. Not sure -- how do the futures > of Perl > and Ruby look to you guys? Or is there an even better choice than > either > of those two? > > I will want to use the language to manipulate data files, but I also > want > to be able to do more with web application frameworks and > model-view-controller systems. So Ruby on Rails would be a possible > direction, but I'm not sure if knowing Ruby actually helps with > understanding Ruby on Rails. > > All opinions are welcome! > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list