How Ruby is beating Python in the battle for the Soul of System Administration

I.e., it seems rather that Ruby has gained a high profile in system administration, not due to any inherent characteristics of the language or library, but because Puppet and subsequently Chef happened to be written by people who wanted to use Ruby.

Based on TFA, this was a matter of taste. I can't, for example, see why it should particularly matter for system administration whether "‘len’ was a function instead of a method)." It doesn't. But the fact that the guy who went on to write a reasonably important tool preferred to do so in Ruby on the basis of such personal prejudices made Ruby important just insofar as the tool was important, and probably contributed to Chef being written in Ruby as well.

Most of the reasoning in this article is no better than complaining that len() is a builtin. I fail to see how Perl-golf style conciseness is inherently more "productive" (particularly when it makes it harder to understand and maintain operationally important software). I fail to see how the crushing burden of spelling out 'import re' makes regex unacceptably distant in Python. I fail to see how Ruby is inherently stress-relieving or better for people who use vi, and if you don't think there is magic in Python that is probably because you have not gotten that deeply into the language. All this is pretty spurious, I think.

And if I wanted Perl, then Perl is the best possible Perl, already familiar to tons of sysadmins; and lots of good things are happening in Perl development.

What isn't spurious is if you happen to like Ruby, even if only for stupid reasons like Luke's; or if you really want to work with a tool like Chef that requires you to write Ruby. Those are perfectly good reasons for using Ruby.

But multiple languages will be used into the far future. In reality, the reason that Ruby and Python (and for that matter Perl) are so frequently put head-to-head is because they are so very similar in their abilities. That's okay. Write what you like.

     Last 10 lines in a file? 'tail -10 filename.txt'

     ruby -e 'lines=[]; while gets(); lines 

     mysql -u root godzilla -s -e 'show tables' \
     | ruby -ne '$_.strip!; puts %Q{SELECT count(*) \
       as cnt, "#$_" as tbl FROM #$_; }' \
     | mysql -u root godzilla -s \
     | sort -nr \
     | ruby -ne 'parts = $_.split /\s+/; \
       puts "%40s : %s" % parts.reverse' \
     | head -10