441–450 of 856 posts
Ruby doesn't have anything unique going for, its success as an "aesthetic language" can be easily copied by python, once it's become ubiquitos
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I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first. After all, there was a reason people put so much effort into writing Numpy in the first place. I think a lot of people were attracted to the language design, as captured in the Zen of Python ( https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ ), such as: Explicit is better than implicit. Readability counts. Errors should never pass silently (unless explicitly silenced)…
There are just too many ways to do things in Ruby. How many forms for an if-else or for loopin can you name in Ruby? Just as the simplest example. Monkeypatching is also awful for readability. Explicit imports are way more readable than things appearing into current namespace implicit kind of stuff like it happens with Ruby
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I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first. After all, there was a reason people put so much effort into writing Numpy in the first place. I think a lot of people were attracted to the language design, as captured in the Zen of Python ( https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ ), such as: Explicit is better than implicit. Readability counts. Errors should never pass silently (unless explicitly silenced)…
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. This is so hilariously wrong in python though
Compare Python to C/C++, where even just getting a working binary from source is fraught with many competing tools. Or boost vs std and whatnot.
Others have already pointed out the contrast with Perl.
Now I really despise Python. It's the source of probably 80% of my day to day pain in managing a complex set of infra. It was just never meant to scale to the level of complexity in which it gets applied. And certain types of algorithms / logic turn into and incomprehensible unmaintainable mess when done using so-called "idiomatic" methods.
But as a language, its simplicity, transparent, direct and open design make it highly amenable for this sort of ubiquitous application in ways Ruby just isn't. Ruby is all about incorporating a large amount of knowledge of implicit behaviour into your mental model, and then it works great. Python is about knowing nothing. If you come to Python knowing nothing at all, there are probably 5 - 10 land mines to step on but after that its just "what you probably think it does is what it does" territory.
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I'll bite on "just a fad in webdev circles", in case you are serious and not trolling. Railsworld is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rails this year. As I'm sure you know, Rails is built on Ruby. 20 years does not fit my definition of fad.
I see what you mean, but I counter with Plone. It's been around for 24 years, and the annual Plone Conference is coming up in a couple months. Still, you don't see a whole lot of new Plone sites rolling out these days, and there's no Automattic-scale company with click-here-to-deploy convenience. Nothing against Plone (although I was very happy to put its foundation layer, Zope, in my rear view mirror). It's a fine p…
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I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first. After all, there was a reason people put so much effort into writing Numpy in the first place. I think a lot of people were attracted to the language design, as captured in the Zen of Python ( https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/ ), such as: Explicit is better than implicit. Readability counts. Errors should never pass silently (unless explicitly silenced)…
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. This is so hilariously wrong in python though
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>I think Python was popular as a general-purpose language first. What were their choices though, Perl? It's easy to see why Perl lost out. Other than PHP, I don't really know of any other JIT scripting languages they could have chosen.
The other strong contender at the time was Tcl, especially when combined with the graphical library as tcl/tk. Python implemented tk as well given it's popularity. Tcl's extensibility led to expect, which was very useful for automating scripting over telnet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect