My take away: As a Python developer, I should really check out Ruby. It's like Python in some ways, but in other ways it may help give me an additional perspective on programming.
Thanks for the article! Mark
What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
61–70 of 247 posts
Re: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small. (Originally said about academics, but works for programmers, too.)
I don't think the fights should be vicious, but I think the stakes are fairly high, and even though Ruby and Python are close cousins in the grand scheme of things, they really do represent profoundly different philosophies when you look more closely at the languages. It would be nice if these differences could always be discussed with civility, of course. I use both Ruby and Python enough to appreciate that both lan…
That's just another reason for vicious fights besides small stakes, small differences.
Just ask the protestants and the catholics.
Re: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
#63> Ruby takes full advantage of the Lisp chainsaw. I always get a little sad and slightly irritated when I hear people say things like this. This is a statement born from ignorance and misunderstanding. What ruby does to present micro-DSLs are what any language that lets the programmer influence the scope of single dispatch and has a lightweight syntax for function calls can do. They are not what Lisp macros do, and d…
You might be taking the statement out of context, and you are certainly quoting it out of context (although brevity is appreciated.) The statement in the talk was made to illustrate the differences between Ruby and Python, and it was not made to suggest that Ruby was replicating all the benefits of Lisp.
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Re: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
#64> Ruby takes full advantage of the Lisp chainsaw. I always get a little sad and slightly irritated when I hear people say things like this. This is a statement born from ignorance and misunderstanding. What ruby does to present micro-DSLs are what any language that lets the programmer influence the scope of single dispatch and has a lightweight syntax for function calls can do. They are not what Lisp macros do, and d…
You might be taking the statement out of context, and you are certainly quoting it out of context (although brevity is appreciated.) The statement in the talk was made to illustrate the differences between Ruby and Python, and it was not made to suggest that Ruby was replicating all the benefits of Lisp.
I understand the intent, but I do not feel that it loses its incorrectness by taking it out of context.
That people even feel this comparison is appropriate is what has me depressed. It represents a fairly fundamental set of misunderstandings.
Re: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really have to switch from one to another? I learned both languages, love them both, and use them both. There's too much hate in the world of programming languages.
The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small. (Originally said about academics, but works for programmers, too.)
I thought that was originally said about college student government/politics...
Then again, programming language is a very personal choice for many, so if you insult a language, you insult the person. There aren't many polyglot programmers that are detached from their preferred language.
For me, I prefer Python, but I'm not going to blindly defend it.
Re: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
#66It's not self.call(:my_method) --- that's nuts. It's my_method[param1, param2] which is aliased to my_method.call(param1, param2). Ruby's syntax can be a crapfest (like Procs not being callable without [] instead of () for example), but this isn't an example.
proc[arg1,arg2] is terrible; strictly worse than proc.call arg1, arg2. When I see an id followed by brackets, I'm looking at a collection, not a callable. This is only exacerbated by Ruby's weird/useful [index,length] convention.
I think what we both want is proc(arg1, arg2).
Re: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small. (Originally said about academics, but works for programmers, too.)
I have the definitive impression that the Pythonistas are more interested in this fighting than most other language cultures. I might be wrong, but I really can't mention any other group of people trolling Perl discussions. It is the same for Ruby? It really seems strange for a language which got the name from Monthy Python. (-: Is it some inferiority feelings to environments which are fun ? :-)
I've found quite the opposite; my experience with Python users has been consistently personable. If anything, the party line seems to be "this is the way we do things, if you like what you see, come on in, if not, no worries". I mean, this whole article is really just a troll post on Python by a Rube (that's what they're called, right?)
Re: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could almost certainly achieve that with the implementation of blocks provided by this package: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/withhacks/
Wow, I've never seen that before. I'm also not sure I'd say a solution that uses bytecode rewriting is really working within the language, but that's a pretty interesting package anyhow.
Well, normally I would agree - but if its entirely abstracted away in a library (and the library is well written) then it might sort-of-kind-of-maybe be ok.
Python itself does varying degrees of bytecode optimisation depending on which version you're using.
Re: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Syntax is human. Syntax is ergonomics. A programming language is the bridge between man and machine. Lisp, I would argue, is far more about the machine than the man and that is the simple reason why it's not more popular. Python was cool before the libraries; that's why those libraries got written in the first place. Lisp has been around forever and is still lacking in libraries and other support.
"Lisp, I would argue, is far more about the machine than the man and that is the simple reason why it's not more popular." Pleas do, i would love to hear your argument. I fail to see how lisp is less humane than python, when i find it to be exactly the opposite. Edit: what i meant was that lisp is more about the human, not that python is more about the machine, i hope i don't get misunderstood.
As a non lisp programmer, it is hard for me to automatically see what is going on in a lisp program because of mismatched " ' " and a lot of parenthesis. I believe this is one of his points. When I was learning python, or ruby, for that matter ( I use both! ) I never felt like I had no idea what was going on in the code even before I learned the languages.
Re: What Pythonistas Think of Ruby
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the definitive impression that the Pythonistas are more interested in this fighting than most other language cultures. I might be wrong, but I really can't mention any other group of people trolling Perl discussions. It is the same for Ruby? It really seems strange for a language which got the name from Monthy Python. (-: Is it some inferiority feelings to environments which are fun ? :-)
I've found quite the opposite; my experience with Python users has been consistently personable. If anything, the party line seems to be "this is the way we do things, if you like what you see, come on in, if not, no worries". I mean, this whole article is really just a troll post on Python by a Rube (that's what they're called, right?)
the party line seems to be "this is the way we do
things, if you like what you see, come on in, if not,
no worries"