Ask HN: Why Python over Ruby?

Post by skawaii » Wed, Jul 01, 2009, 4:05 PM UTC

bretthoerner wrote: post #90

johnbender wrote: post #77

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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.

Post by skawaii » Wed, Jul 01, 2009, 4:20 PM UTC

GeoJawDguJin wrote: post #102

rbanffy wrote: post #97

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"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 stayi…

Rails folks are like that. Even though the rest of the Ruby community is much more reasonable, the weekly Rails debacle has driven a lot of people away from Ruby, including me. If Rails weren't around, it would be much easier to enjoy Ruby without having to use it in isolation. Then again, a whole lot of people wouldn't have gotten into it in the first place. Ruby lived fast and died young. If you don't want to use P…

Post by bruceh » Wed, Jul 01, 2009, 4:57 PM UTC

Post by sreque » Wed, Jul 01, 2009, 5:25 PM UTC

yangyang wrote: post #37

jimmyrr wrote: post #34

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...strange ad-hoc combination of other languages. I call bullshit, sir. Ruby is objectively less strange and more consistent than Python. Some has to do with the fact that Python is older - hence has more baggage to carry. A lot of it, though, just has to do with poor/missing design choices. Specifics? - ruby 'block' passing convention is much cleaner and more powerful than python's 'for'/iterators. - python's global…

I have used both, Python more than Ruby. Python's iterators are more usable in many situations than the Ruby block system. I can return an iterator, stick it in a variable, call another function with it that returns another iterator, and so on. Python's classes also seem cleaner and less magical than Ruby's. For example, a method on a class is just an attribute that happens to be a method. Much more intuitive than Ru…

Post by skawaii » Wed, Jul 01, 2009, 5:28 PM UTC

caffeine wrote: post #62

ptomato wrote: post #13

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Though it must be said, rubygems is miles ahead of anything available for python.

I'm not convinced that's true, as the depth and quality of rubygems are inferior to the depth and quality of eggs available in python. Find me e.g. a "gem install scipy" equivalent for Ruby. However - "easy_ un install scipy" REALLY needs to work!