VR

Right now, as for Ruby convert should do, I'm thinking, Perl becomes obsolete on FreeBSD box. Why? First of all ruby is already installed on Your favorite BSD flavor powered box, since portinstall/portupgrade suite is written in Ruby. So - almost out of the box :) You have both Perl and Ruby. Ruby have most of all needed Perl features (as for FreeBSD sysadmin) - it has regular expression support, flexible syntax, can operate on low level OS ideas. And it is much harder to write unreadable code than in Perl.

Of course Perl is not obsolete. Especially on FreeBSD box, but this entry tries to show how I'm surprised that so few tools on FreeBSD relays on Ruby. Let numbers speak for itself:

$ make search key=PHP | g -E "^Port" | wc -l
     742
$ make search key=Ruby | g -E "^Port" | wc -l
     367
$ make search key=Perl | g -E "^Port" | wc -l
    7248

Of course, result are obvious, since Perl is almost from always available in UNIX toolbox, so number of tools using it is enormous. Not mention power of CPAN. But even Ruby foot print seems me to small. Now, I will try to do something more useful than Hello world or Four Days on Rails and then will if still Rubys footprint would seem me so small... Maybe there is some small catch... With tiny font...