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Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#91

Post by peskytruth »

tdavis wrote: post #72
delano wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... a community rife with arrogant children It's difficult to accept your rational argument when you include stuff like this.

Why is that? It can easily be proven. I'm not trying to suggest that everyone who uses Ruby is an arrogant child as I even have friends who certainly don't fit that bill, but when you have an especially abrasive attitude like that within a community, it only takes a minority to sour the majority. And while it certainly isn't a fault of the language , it definitely influences it usage for some people.

Umm....and have you ever spent anytime time in #python? Some are helpful, but there are a choice few who I would describe as arrogant children.

In any community of size, you get good seeds and bad seeds. Python is not immune to this.

Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#92

Post by peskytruth »

colins_pride wrote: post #79
wildjim wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should be careful how much they quote Google as their reason for preferring Python. The main reason was when they were standardising on the core-languages they could support, Python was enormously far ahead cf. the competition, so it was an obvious choice. And now, with all that code investment, you do NOT want to start again. And if you have the money, of course you'd be interested in hiring the best develope…

This is somewhat tangential, but I'm pretty sure that Google re-writes the search code ever few years.

Yeah? Well, none of that search code is written in Python. It's C/C++.

See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/754301/what-programming-l... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/923225/does-google-use-py...

Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#93

Post by peskytruth »

steveklabnik wrote: post #81
drawkbox wrote: post #22

In Python you dont' have to type 'end', just kidding although for some reason it reminds me of VB for this reason. I wish it didn't but it does. Why have an end be anymore than 1 character on a serious note, that is lots of keystrokes extra not needed. But more seriously Python is a growth like Javascript. It has grown and adapted to every change it has been required because it has a very rapid iteration time and is…

Just as a quick note, you can use '{' and '}' instead of 'do' and 'end' if you want. Standard conventions say that one line blocks get {}, and multi-line ones get do-end.

Just for blocks/procs. Method definitions still require def/end.

Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#94

Post by rbanffy »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #18

From the Python website: "Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language." When I first saw this, I went "Google? Whoa. I gotta check this out" :)

Google, NASA, Industrial Light and Magic...

That's one cool list

Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#95

Post by rbanffy »

delano wrote: post #49
tdavis wrote: post #15

Python is far more mature, isn't a strange ad-hoc combination of other languages, has a third-party library to do anything and everything (which is probably also reasonably mature), and doesn't have a community rife with arrogant children. I'm generalizing to some extent, of course, but these are the things that I and other developers I know associate with Ruby (including many who's startups are built on it). I imagi…

... a community rife with arrogant children It's difficult to accept your rational argument when you include stuff like this.

Well.. Zed Shaw is raving about Python these days.

And yes, a lot of us pythonistas view him with suspicion.

Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#96

Post by carbon8 »

bretthoerner wrote: post #90
johnbender wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very flexible. Once you learn what the sytnax means the implementation of blocks and iterators is one of the best parts of the language. 3.upto(6){ |x| puts x } I don't think the uniqueness of a language is any reason not to learn it. To be honest that sounds lazy. PS I'm not a Ruby zealot, and Python is a great language

So I just saw 3 ways to print from 3 to 6... are those all used in the wild? Zen of Python: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." Sure, there are other ways to do it in Python, but it'd be frowned upon to use something like 3.upto(6) rather than a standard range() that everyone is used to. Readability matters.

I'd argue 3.upto(6) is much more readable and obvious than range(3, 7). Even just on a conceptual level, Python requires a degree of translation and its stop argument is not intuitive whereas even someone who has never programmed before can understand the Ruby.

Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#97

Post by rbanffy »

tdavis wrote: post #15

Python is far more mature, isn't a strange ad-hoc combination of other languages, has a third-party library to do anything and everything (which is probably also reasonably mature), and doesn't have a community rife with arrogant children. I'm generalizing to some extent, of course, but these are the things that I and other developers I know associate with Ruby (including many who's startups are built on it). I imagi…

"a community rife with arrogant children."

During FISL, a couple days ago, I witnessed something that really bothered me. It was a presentation comparing Rails with Seaside (which is, by itself, like comparing racing cars with subarines) and the arrogance of the Rails guy dismissing Seaside, Squeak and Smalltalk was very uncomfortable.

It seemed the room was too small to fit all the egos inside it.

I considered staying until the end and asking a couple questions to demolish the presenter, but I decided it would not be worth it. His belief on the inherent superiority of Ruby and Rails over any other language and framework, past, present and future, bordered on the religious.

Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#98

Post by mbreese »

nailer wrote: post #86
tel wrote: post #74

I like Ruby (culturally) more than Python. Python has NumPy/SciPy/and friends, so I use Python. This, I feel, is a strong point for most who are using a scripting language to do scientific work.

How do you find Numpy/Scipy on Python compared to statistical languages like R? Also what kind of work are you doing?

I don't know about tel, but I use both pretty frequently (and usually together with rpy). R is great for some things, but I typically find that I need to use a general purpose language to acquire the data I'm processing. There are some processing steps that I easier in R though, so I offload things to that when it is more efficient. But for simpler things, I find that numpy is more than adequate for processing data that I've already got in a Python session.

I use them for bioinformatics analysis (large scale genomic comparisons and microarray data analysis). So the larger problem isn't the calculations, it's the data management. And for that Python wins over a pure R solution.

Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#99

Post by tdavis »

delano wrote: post #85
tdavis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? It can easily be proven. I'm not trying to suggest that everyone who uses Ruby is an arrogant child as I even have friends who certainly don't fit that bill, but when you have an especially abrasive attitude like that within a community, it only takes a minority to sour the majority. And while it certainly isn't a fault of the language , it definitely influences it usage for some people.

... it only takes a minority to sour the majority. That's a decision you make for yourself, not an absolute truth.

I thought I was rather clear on the fact that I wasn't speaking in absolute truths. My answers reflect my personal opinion of why I (and others like me, in some cases) choose Python over Ruby.

Re: Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

#100

Post by tdavis »

knowtheory wrote: post #59

What's clear to me reading the comments in this thread, is that there are a lot of people who like Python, and don't understand what people appreciate in Ruby. None of these are reasons why people choose Python over Ruby. Or why Python has become more popular. It is worth noting that Python was also mentioned a lot as a teaching tool when its popularity began ramping up, and some universities have replaced Java and S…

To claim that Ruby is a tangled soup of options and syntactic sugar is to miss the point really.

What is the point? I sincerely wish to learn, for my own intellectual curiosity. Because I have read Ruby code and I have done Ruby tutorials and talked to people who use Ruby and for the life of me, no matter how hard I meditate on the issue, I cannot understand why anyone would use Ruby over Python.

I don't feel Python is absolutely better than Ruby, anymore than an apple can be absolutely better than an orange, but I have yet to gain a comprehension of how Ruby is even relatively better. From a Python -> Ruby perspective I find it particularly perplexing.

Ruby presented far more cognitive hurdles for me because it allows you to do things in ways that seem simultaneously mildly more convenient and completely counter-intuitive to everything I've experienced with similar styles of languages over the past 10 years.

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