A Pragmatic Move From Perl to Ruby
After three months of sustained work, the conclusion is clear: Ruby is a genuinely pleasant language, and the desire to keep writing Perl has faded. Perl remains fast, powerful, and backed by an extraordinary community—if there's an obscure piece of hardware you need to control, CPAN probably has the module for it. The friction, however, is syntactic. Expressions like $hash_of_hashes->{'key'}->{'key2'} turn what should be simple data access into a visual puzzle, and the heavy use of special characters on variables makes code harder to read and easier to break. Perl is good, but it has its limits.
Ruby, in contrast, feels closer to the actual problems being solved. The syntax is cleaner, and that clarity makes it easier to think in terms of the domain rather than the mechanics of the language.
Refactoring Ragnar for the Long Run
The existing Ragnar project has several strengths worth preserving: it's fast, highly configurable, and built around web standards. The separation of logic and presentation via XSLT transforms is sound, and the query engine handles node-level logic effectively. The next iteration, however, will be built on Ruby, moving node data taipus into a conventional database schema for better efficiency.
Plans also include a proper plugin architecture with callbacks tied to the node lifecycle. For now, Rails is being set aside deliberately—the preference is to keep working with XSLT, which fits the project's needs and keeps development enjoyable.
It will be good to have a new project in motion again.
