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Ask HN: Ruby or Python?

• madhouse 16y ago
  You can't really compare Python to RoR, as one's a language, the other is a framework. It's either Ruby <-> Python, or RoR <-> one of the python frameworks (probably Django). Pesonally, I'd go with Python & Django, because I found the Django docs far easier to understand, and less of a pain to set up. Whenever I tried to follow any of the Rails guides, I was advised to throw out everything Ruby my distribution made and compile from source - no thanks. With Django, I could get started with what was immediately available, no compiling neccessary. That, and I found python to be easier to understand than ruby.
  • instakill 16y ago
    Edited. Thanks
• ygtckr 16y ago
  I think Python is a more beginner friendly language. I have started my programming studies with both Python and Ruby and dropped Ruby on the way to concentrate on Python. Some say Ruby suits their thought processes better, but my brain works well with Python code. I don't think there is too much difference between them from a beginner's perspective. I think you should just start studying both of them and drop the one which feels clumsier. I, myself gathered much benefit from this particular approach. Besides the more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn new languages. I advise http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/ http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/ for beginning Ruby and http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index for Python.
• rst 16y ago
  As a rubyist, my main reason for preferring it to Python is what you can do with "blocks". The idiomatic way of iterating over the elements of an array, for example, is: my_array.each do |elt| ... do stuff with elt ...; end That looks like a control structure, but it's actually invoking a library routine ("each") with a block of code (the part between "do" and "end") as an argument. It's easy to write your own routines which also take blocks as arguments, which effectively adds new control structure to the language. This flexibility can be really expressive, but it can also easily lead to code that n00bs find confusing. Python syntax isn't as flexible, but that can make Python code more approachable, particularly to novices. Aside from that, available libraries may make a difference; SciPy and NumPy might come in handy for you, depending on what you're trying to do.