I’ve always been a little afraid of Ruby. It seems to be getting a lot of press these days with projects like Ruby on Rails. I’ve looked at the language a little bit, but I just can’t get into it the way I have with Python.
Today I read this article about people shuffling around from C++ to Java then on to Python or Ruby (actually the article a bit deeper than that, but go read it for yourself to get the full depth of it). While talking about Ruby the author made a comment that finally made me realize why I have been uneasy with the syntax of Ruby:
‘people who have come from Perl and found Ruby to be a “better Perl, with objects that work,”‘
And that pretty much sums it up for me I think. I’m not a huge fan of Perl, and Ruby is more like Perl than anything.
I’m still concerned that Ruby seems to be gaining popularity, but that’s mainly because I’m a bigger fan of Python. And now I have a better argument to defend myself with when I tell people that.
2 comments ↓
My defence of Python is:-
1) Elegance. At first, I thought “Yuk, that whitespace is so restrictive”. Now I think “Good, that whitespace is so restrictive”.
2) If it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for me.
3) Deployment. My Nokia series 60 phone can run Python. Firefox is going to have XUL scripting with Python.
Ruby has very little going for it beyond Rails.
Its funny, I thought the same thing about whitespace too in the begining. Then I looked at all of the code I had written over the years and I realized that I already indented my code that way just as a force of habit. Once I realized that, my barriers to Python disappeared.
-Nick
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