I came across as aggressively flamey - but what I intended to communicate was the difference in the communities. In the Ruby community, if somebody posted a rea

I came across as aggressively flamey - but what I intended to communicate was the difference in the communities. In the Ruby community, if somebody posted a really long regex driven scraper, people would ask why it was written and recommend looking at libraries/gems instead of writing your own. In Python, it ends up on the front page of HN. Ruby's community is very pragmatic and Python's is more scientific. Most people I'm discussing learning programming with are interested in making something, and pragmatism is far better suited to their goals. e.g. from my perspective, as someone who uses programming as a tool, writing my own scraper is boring (other scrapers work well enough for me). From my friend's perspective, writing a scraper is a fun experiment.