I agree with much of what you say about the two different threads and perspectives here (and elsewhere) whenever this argument comes up. However: > And for tho

I agree with much of what you say about the two different threads and perspectives here (and elsewhere) whenever this argument comes up. However: > And for those who think this is trivial, think about all the packages that are in fact written in Python that are part of the desktop or base system. Python is literally embedded in everything! [...then later...] All that being said, this is a very hard problem to generally solve. I would hope that Ruby would be more Pythonic in the distro, but I don't see it being a priority for Ruby folks anytime soon.... You say that Ruby should be more Pythonic and that this is not a priority for "Ruby folks", but I'm not sure that's a fair way to characterize the distro problem. In fact, from Ruby's point of view, Debian has a special pride of place: it's the only officially supported Linux distro (since testing is done on Debian machines, I believe). For more on that see the discussion and links in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614618 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614618 (tenderlove is Aaron Patterson, a Ruby core dev). I would argue, as I say elsewhere in this thread, that the reason Python is so well handled is precisely what you mention in the first bit I quote. Because so much of the Gnome desktop is written in Python, perhaps Python gets special treatment by the distro. That suggests that the distro needs to meet the language devs at least part way, rather than that the language folks are the only ones who need to change their attitude.