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Ruby 2.0.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes "Today version 2.0.0 of Ruby has been released. This is a stable release, and the Ruby team has done their best to make it compatible with 1.9, making it easier to migrate than it was to switch from 1.8 to 1.9. New core language features include: 'Keyword arguments, which give flexibility to API design; Module#prepend, which is a new way to extend a class; A literal %i, which creates an array of symbols easily; __dir__, which returns the dirname of the file currently being executed; and UTF-8 default encoding, which make many magic comments omissible.' There are also new built-in libraries for lazy stream and for an asynchronous exception handling API. The release includes a number of performance improvements and debug support for DTrace."
1. Ruby is not a toy not suitable for 'serious' programs, it's very similar to Python in fact, it's not as strong on science or math though as python because of libraries available in Python, if that's what you mean, say that, it's far more convincing.
2. Python could easily replace Perl for system admin tasks - come up with specific criticisms if you have met with any roadblocks - you would likely find similar problems with Ruby to Python if you somehow couldn't manage sysadmin or text scripting with Python.
3. Ruby, Python and Perl are actually quite interchangeable and could all be used for 'serious' tasks, or for short admin or text processing - all 3 are ideally suited to these things, and frankly the differences are not huge, Perl is slightly gnarlier, Python slightly stricter, Ruby slightly more anarchic, all 3 would get the job done easily.
4. WTF has Rails got to do with any of this? Troll much?
5. Why should we waste our time trying to convince someone with such trenchant and at the same time wildly inaccurate preconceived ideas?