Old thread but anyone has changed his opinion?

Of course I am biased as I use ruby since 4 years consistently (for me, no other language before has convinced me so much that it is a great programming language)

Now I give python all the power for being readable too, but it is time for perl to rest in peace as far as new people learning it is concerned.
(And before perl rests in peace someone has to kill off php for being a horribly designed language. The few www stuff it can do, other languages can and should do better, and if these languages dont, then it is time to kick their devs in the a** for allowing php to exist as it does right now.)

why don't you post to comp.lang.perl.misc and see what you can get

I give my strong opinions on this at my blog: http://www.strangeblueplanet.com/200...thon-ruby.html

It's true that Python today is obviously a better language to work with than Perl, but Ruby is better still. So I'd advise that in the long run learning Ruby will pay exponential dividends for you, even if the spartan simplicity of Python's syntax seems at first more appealing. It's an illusion... Python's simplicity is done Microsoft-style: lots of surface simplicity to cover common cases, but when you need something else, it gets ugly. Ruby is truly, fundamentally simple in a good way, and as such elegant and concise, and powerful... and I therefore assume over the long run it will "win out" over Perl or Python. For more details about why I think these things, see the blog post.

Had a quick read of your blog. Not convinced by your rubbishing of Perl. I've done something like 8 yrs of C, then 8 yrs of Perl (plus others along the way) and I'm very happy with Perl.
Maybe you should post that at www.perlmonks.org and get a detailed discussion.

I'm not convinced by his rubbish of perl either. In fact, the whole concept of Ruby/Python/Perl being in the same class of languages (and thus comparable) is fallacious. Ruby and Python is much like pascal/modula-2/java because it encourages structured programming a la djikstra/wirth. Perl was born from unix shell scripting and sed/awk/grep.

As I'm sure I have said at some point, my first, official programming language was Perl. I tinkered around with Perl 4 on an MS-DOS install on an old laptop.

The biggest problem I have with Perl is that there are too many synonymous values which, in turn leads to serious obfuscation and acts as a serious deterrent to anyone looking to learn Perl (IMHO). Not to mention, the lack of standardized syntax. When I tried to came back from a "break" from Perl, I never picked the language up again because so much had changed in my short time away. I tried, don't think I didn't try, but it just wasn't the same.

Python has its place, but it isn't in my list of languages to use. I have tinkered around with it, but soon grew upset with it, as some tasks were "Microsoft-y" in nature and I found it getting mundane.

Ruby? Never been drawn to it. I have looked at it a few times, given it a few test runs, but I do not find anything special about it. Well, to rephrase that, there is not anything about Ruby that appeals to me.

I am still going to be stuck in my ways of using Common Lisp for 95% of my tasks and Java for the other 5%.

EDIT: @abolishtheun
The OP wanted to get people's opinions about Python, Perl and Ruby as they saw all three languages as equal and viable options. And before anyone retorts with, "Well, it is still a dumb question and the OP should really have just figured it out with themselves," I want to state that despite the tinkering-and-time-abundant mentality many of the people on this forum seem to have (which is reflected in their responses), not everyone who uses Linux has the time to fudge about with several programming languages to find one that suits them best. Yes, it is obvious the user will have to do a bit of figuring things out for themselves, but some people - myself included - like getting a bit of direction before stepping out of our front doors into strange, new territories.

I'm not about to say that any one language is better than the other, I am only relaying my personal (key word) experiences with each language. And to be completely honest, neither Perl, Python or Ruby meet my needs or work the way I would like them to. Common Lisp suits most of my needs; Java suits my need for distributive portability, alas I do not have much time to dedicate towards writing full-blown applications for cross-platform distribution.

In conclusion, while this topic - on a purely logical basis - holds nearly zero value, humans are semi-logical, as a whole. Many things we do cannot be explained through a process of logic, and the OP does not deserve, or need responses like yours, abolishtheun. So if you would care to not inadvertently denounce the OP to being an illogical pile of carbon-based proteins and actually respond accordingly, that would be wonderful. Save your like-responses for homework posters.

The purpose of this thread was for the OP to hear everyone's input on their experiences with those languages to be able to make a decision for themselves.

It depends on what you want to do. If you want to code for the Web, it would probably be good to be familiar with Perl, as about 80% to 85% of Web content is coded in Perl, according to mid-2000s estimates. However, Python seems to be gaining ground, being easier to learn and more maintainable than Perl. Read the excellent article by Eric S. Raymond in Linux Journal, dated Apr 30, 2000: Why Python?. Like Perl, Python is an interpreted language, although utilities exist to allow programs to be turned in to stand-alone executables on Windows, UNIX and Linux systems, increasing its usefulness beyond just Web scripting. You would need to be sure that the hosting service supports Python scripting if that became your preferred language.

I recently saw a comparison (sorry, can't quote URL) showing how various computer languages were fairing among users over time, and it seemed to indicate that as of 2010 Perl and Ruby are losing ground while Python is gaining ground among programmers. The inscrutability of the syntax and difficulty in writing large programs in Perl may be a factor.

That has obviously not been true for a long time. At least, not since CGI scripting (which was usually done in Perl) got displaced by things like PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, Java Server Pages, etc.

I personally think that learning 4 languages concurrently is best: when one is driving you mad, you can task-switch.

One that works best for data storage and retrieval, PSQL/TSQL/PostgresSQL/MySQL/many others - take your pick, not important
Another which offers high performance, but carries a big programmer time penalty - C/C++/C#/Java - ditto
Another which inherently serves many concurrent users without your code - PHP/Perl/P* - ditto
And another optimised to create the best user experience: native Javascript/dojotoolkit/JQuery/BashScripting/Qt - ditto

It is actually better if they are as disimilar as possible: C++/oop PHP/dojotoolkit would be the worst combo in that respect.

Andy T