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As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language pow

by wging 15y ago

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most languages, what am I missing?

Game_Ender 15y ago
In my opinion Ruby has a slightly more obscure syntax with custom symbols, and it's C API is not as clean and well put together as Python's.
- 16s 15y ago
  Which is more obscure? Reverse a string in ruby: string.reverse() Reverse a string in python: string[::-1]
  - evincarofautumn 15y ago
    Slice syntax in Python always bothered me. This would be slightly more readable: ''.join(reversed(string)) Except it requires you to have an idea of how iteration works (beginners don’t) and why that “join” needs to be there, and it’s still an order of magnitude slower. But hey. Ruby is prettier in some ways, Python in others, and beggars, as they say, can’t be choosers.
    - 16s 15y ago
      Way way slower than the slicing.
  - TylerE 15y ago
    What an odd example. Other than perhaps a palindrome detector, I'm having a really hard time coming up with a use for a reversed-strings. Python DOES provide a reverse for arrays.
elektronaut 15y ago
I think you could pretty much substitute Python and Django with Ruby and Rails, and the article would still ring true. As a Ruby developer I've only had brief encounters with Python, but to me it seems like a language I would love for the same reasons I like Ruby.
espeed 15y ago
Library support. For example, there really is no Ruby equivalent to SciPy, NumPy, Matplotlib or NLTK (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3179370 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3179370). However, there has been some effort in the Ruby community to begin the process of developing some of these libraries (see SciRuby http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3180369 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3180369). but the Python libraries have been in development for years so this will be no easy feat.
- berntb 15y ago
  >> Library support. Isn't that rather an argument for Java or Perl? What I don't get is the cheerleading for Python? Ruby has/had something similar going with Rails. I mean, the article even notes that it is a middle of the road choice, optimised to not be extreme.
  - pjscott 15y ago
    It's an argument for any language that has libraries available, weighted by your need for those particular libraries and their quality.
    - achompas 15y ago
      Right, in addition to the usual efficiency concerns (can you afford that 0.5-1s of JVM spinup? do you need mature multiprocessing libraries?)
  - espeed 15y ago
    Yes, Java and Perl have large libraries, but wging asked what he would be missing going from Python to Ruby -- missing libraries is the big one.
  - pbreit 15y ago
    No, it's an argument for python over ruby.
  - amcintyre 15y ago
hello_moto 15y ago
That depends on your taste buds. Mine prefer consistency. Ruby is a alippery slope when it comes to consistency and it requires the whole community to change certain attitudes.
- jimbokun 15y ago
  Ruby seems more consistent to me, as it follows the "everything is an object" design principle quite rigorously. Python does not have any consistent design principle like that at its core, as far as I can tell.
  - hello_moto 15y ago
    This is something that I struggle a lot between Ruby, Python, and JavaScript. Ruby/JS everything "is an object" is definitely consistent when it comes to "design principle". But somehow I just can't grok/remember/stick to my head every time I read Ruby/JS code. I suppose as a user, I'm more concern with the readability (a.k.a coding style) more than the "everything is an object".
masklinn 15y ago
The downside of Ruby is the third-party packages, especially advanced/industrial-strength stuff (NumPy/SciPy for instance). The main upside of Ruby is blocks, however limited (compared to Smalltalk's) the ability to craft your own control structures is incredibly powerful and empowering (and you can't really do that in Python, you can abuse decorators for it nowadays but it's not exactly sexy or readable, or generally a good idea) Ruby also makes metaprogramming easier and more common, though the jury's still out on whether it's a good thing or not.
- jshen 15y ago
  I'd also say that ruby has done a better job of moving forward. Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. I think JRuby is more mature than jpython, and I know this will start the flames, but I think ruby is clearly better for web stuff; not just rails, but the whole ecosystem. Edit: I also think bundler is better than what is going on in python land.
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. They're not comparable, so no. > I think JRuby is more mature than jpython Pretty different situations, from 2006 to 2009 two lead JRuby developers were hired specifically for that by Sun (later left for EngineYard) and a third was hired by ThoughtWorks for the same. For Jython this only happened in 2008, after the project had pretty much gone on freeze due to the original founder leaving to work on the Pypy project. Compare IronPython to IronRuby instead, and the situation is reversed. Same if you compare Rubinius and Pypy. > and I know this will start the flames, but I think ruby is clearly better for web stuff That's your personal judgement, I don't agree.
    - jshen 15y ago
      You dodged the first two issues. Python 3 is causing serious pain, does django work with it yet? Second, who cares why JRuby is more mature, it is.
      - 15y ago
alinajaf 15y ago
I'm an extremely happy ruby user but have nothing against python, it's just that the languages operate at such a similar level of abstraction that it seems like a bit of a waste to spend time learning python when I could be learning C or Haskell. FWIW though, I get serious library envy, especially with regard to NLTK. Ruby has web development cornered but is decades behind python when it comes to anything around machine learning and scientific computing.
- pwang 15y ago
  > Ruby has web development cornered but is decades behind python when it comes to anything around machine learning and scientific computing. The irony of this is that many folks in the Python scientific computing space pine for better syntax extension facilities so that they could do more "natural" DSLs for data analysis and embedding math inside Python code. The object lesson here is that communities and passionate users matter. Python took root in some scientific computing environments and certain dedicated individuals built up a software library and invested in growing a community that is now a force to be reckoned with. If the same people had all chosen Ruby and built a community around that, there is no obvious reason why Ruby shouldn't be the one with the great scientific libraries.
wcarss 15y ago
Ruby's blocks and built in regular-expressions are two examples of things you're missing. if result =~ /regex/ that kind of thing is awesome for readability, but it can also be pretty darn slow. There's also some interesting things about the ruby object model and interpreter that are different from python's approach. Whereas in the python REPL you type help(object) to get the docs on that object, in ruby you type object.methods or object.public_methods, etc. It's less documentation oriented, and more code-exploration oriented, but the two end up delivering the same sort of information. Hope that's helpful! Ruby's a lot of fun to tool around with, and there are (in my opinion) fewer things about it to trip you up completely than there are when first learning python. But once you use it for a while and get beyond the basics, it becomes clear that there's a lot of unfocused cruft foating about, which fits no rhyme nor reason. Much more than Python has. (cautionary note: I'm not an expert with either language)
- shazow 15y ago
  Have a look at IPython for a more code-exploration oriented experience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipython http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipython (Sadly the homepage doesn't quite get the simpler sell points across as well. http://ipython.org/ http://ipython.org/)
- maxerickson 15y ago
  It sounds like object.public_methods and object.methods are a lot like dir(object) in python.
- zem 15y ago
  ruby does have its share of cruft, but it also has some inspired features that make a far bigger difference than you'd think they would. blocks are the biggest (specifically, syntactic support for attaching a lexical closure to every method call, which the object can choose to use or not), but here's another cute one: the case statement case object when matcher1; ... when matcher2; ... end performs a method call on the matchers, with the object as an argument, rather than vice versa. so you can say things like case name when "John Smith"; puts "hello again" when / Smith$/; puts "are you related to john?" end the string "John Smith" and the regexp / Smith$/ will each call a different matcher to see if they match your name - a far cleaner design than the string class having to provide matchers for everything you might want to use in a case statement.
nO0b 15y ago
Blocks. Ruby gets a lot of things wrong, but blocks are one thing they more or less do well. Everything good that has been built from/for Ruby owes a large measure of its success to Ruby's block implementation. Python programmers are definitely looking up the power curve at Ruby.
tripzilch 15y ago
Some many years ago I decided I should learn a new scripting language because PHP wasn't general-purpose enough. I decided it would be either Python, Ruby or Perl. For some reason Perl was dropped early, I forget why (don't worry I learned some Perl later). So I started Googling for Python vs Ruby. After checking some language basics tutorials, I decided that really, for my purposes they were about equivalent in power (didn't know much about library support yet). The one thing that pushed me towards Python was that most articles I could find comparing Ruby and Python were written by a happy user of one of these languages. However, all Python users wrote something like "I guess you can do everything in either of them, it's just a matter of preference and I happen to have picked Python", while the Ruby users tended to be somewhat more flaming and arrogant about it, especially in the comments sections. In the end I went with Python because the community seemed more friendly. However, I stayed for the library support. Especially after that one time I installed pyTwitter and I could just do `import twitter`, I was pretty impressed by that (I assume Ruby has an excellent Twitter lib too, btw). Also, just a little disclaimer: This was a couple of years back (I forget how many, 5 or so) maybe the Ruby community changed, and it's also totally possible that I just happened to land on a rather "particular" region of the Ruby blogosphere, so take this cum grano salis. I had to make a choice and was about this close to just flipping a coin over it :)
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  Also, just a little disclaimer: This was a couple of years back (I forget how many, 5 or so) maybe the Ruby community changed, and it's also totally possible that I just happened to land on a rather "particular" region of the Ruby blogosphere, so take this cum grano salis. I had to make a choice and was about this close to just flipping a coin over it :) ruby-talk used to have, as one of a number of perma-threads, the question of "Why Ruby over Python". The discussion was almost always entirely civil, with most people suggesting that the questioner try both for a bit and pick the one that clicked best. I used to host (on ruby-doc.org) a page called "Ruby Eye for the Python Guy" that tried to summarise the comments and offer links to help folks make a decision. The community on ruby-talk at that time (probably 5 years ago) was extremely polite and helpful, and I'm sorry you landed on some opinionated blog that likely only reflected a small group of developers. I don't follow ruby-talk much any more, so I can't say how it is, but there has always been a pretty strong tradition of MINSWAN: "matz is nice so we are nice." I expect that's still encouraged. There are, of course, various sub-groups around this or that library or framework that may have zero exposure to that, think they're the shit, etc., but I hope people considering Ruby don't a priori dismiss the majority of Rubyists as rude because of bad reports about a handful of people. OK, end of Ruby PSA. Side note: I'm often puzzled by people who think a language or framework or whatever geek thing has to "win." Be happy for happy people.
thehotelambush 15y ago
I used Python for a really long time and switched to Ruby several months ago. Benefits of Ruby are: -no distinction between expression and statement (everything has a value) -lambdas can thus contain any expression -much bigger range of built-in methods and classes (all permutations of a list, removing duplicates from a list, Rational class, Regexp class, Range class, etc.) -more flexible syntax and "control operators" like each_with_index -almost zero distinction between built-in classes and methods and user-written ones: you can open up Hash (dict) or Array (list) and extend it straightforwardly. Downsides are: -generally uglier and more ambiguous syntax -distinction between functions and methods (b/c "all you can do is send a message") leads to a lot of unnecessary duplication of concepts -so-called "blocks" which are really just a hack to avoid writing the word "lambda" a bunch of times (maybe if the more concise Ruby 1.9 syntax for lambdas had existed earlier blocks wouldn't have been implemented). I think they are based on the idea that most HOFs only require one functional argument, and they encourage functional programming, but they (along with the last bullet point) discourage the general case. They provide some of the functionality of macros. -you can't define a class inside a method (still haven't quite figured out the reasoning behind this one). In general Ruby is definitely more powerful than Python, but in its higher ambitions suffers more obviously from clashes between functional and OO programming. Python's dogmatic insistence on "readability" makes it feel like an old grandma in comparison to Ruby.
- codesuela 15y ago
  > -lambdas can thus contain any expression why would you want to use lambdas if you have generator expressions? eg: map(lambda c: c.strip(), countries.split(',')) vs [c.strip() for c in countries.split(',')] IMHO the latter one is way more readable and generators cover almost all the use cases for lambdas. If you could not do it with a generator expression and choose to use a anonymous function it should have been a method anyway. > -much bigger range of built-in methods and classes (all permutations of a list, removing duplicates from a list, Rational class, Regexp class, Range class, etc.) you mean sets, dictionaries(hashtables) etc.? those are built in as well in Python. Remove duplicates: mylist = list(set(mylist)) Range class: [i for i in range(10)] you can import the rational class via a simple from fractions import Fraction same for regex > -more flexible syntax and "control operators" like each_with_index you can iterate over dictionaries with for k,v in dict.items() if you need the index of a list you can use for i,v in enumerate(list) personally I don't think there is much of a difference between Python and Ruby. One is more mature the other is way hipper and it comes down personal taste which one you choose.
cheald 15y ago
Ruby is Python's slutty sister. She's just as hot, but she'll let you do things to her that Python would dump you for even trying.
bconway 15y ago
As the author points out, a huge standard library. Sure, Ruby has everything you need if you pull in this gem and that gem, but you better hope the gem you need is working that week or you're going to waste a lot of time reading Github logs and back-tracking revisions.
chernevik 15y ago
Ruby/Rails seems to have a more developer-friendly approach to the web development stack than Python/Django. (I am but an egg, more comfortable in Python/Django but learning Ruby/Rails, I wouldn't argue with more experienced folks about any of the following.) Ruby/Rails seems easier to develop and test the full stack application, from client JavaScript to server Ruby response and back. It supports Ajax through injection of injection of JavaScript into HTTP responses served up, based on specifications in server side code. The test architectures seem to reach across the client/server divide, for example checking server side responses to triggering client-side JavaScript. Python/Django are trying, with like lettuce and splinter, but these don't yet seem to be quite to the same standard. Also, because RoR has a lead on web development, new developments in that space seem generally better integrated. For example, Backbone is a young JavaScript MVC style framework for client side development. I've just been fooling with using it with Django, and discovered that its stringification of Json objects for POST doesn't work with Django's parsing of the client request. Maybe more experienced developers spotted and fixed this easily -- my fix is only a couple of lines -- but it's the sort of thing that makes me wonder just how many folks have tried to integrate Django w/ Backbone. I'm guessing that the Backbone community has already spotted and fixed any such issues with RoR. Now I'm not sure how I feel about RoR, it often feels like magic and I'm a little suspicious of stuff like super-convenient JavaScript injection. Maybe when I understand it better it will seems less magical and more convenient. But it isn't hard to see why the web development community likes it.
- funksta 15y ago
  One of the differences between Django and Rails is that the former makes almost no assumptions about how you are going to write your front end. I don't know much about Rails, but it seems to me that it is much more opinionated in that regard. Re: Django & Backbone, you should check out djangbone. It makes it dead simple to create a basic backbone-compatible APIs in Django, and is easy to extend if you need more advanced functionality (full disclosure- I'm its author): https://github.com/af/djangbone https://github.com/af/djangbone
- alinajaf 15y ago
  RE: javascript injection, it's totally optional and in years of doing rails dev work I've never used it (I presume you're talking about the 'remote' option). Actually, the vast majority of my rails stuff recently has been RESTish (or at least Backbone compatible) json endpoints with a CoffeeScript frontend. The front and back end in that case are totally decoupled (though rails does do some nice things to help you organize your frontend code). This would have been hard a few years ago but I've found that as time has wore on rails has become quite a bit more forgiving when you disagree with DHH, e.g.. you can use whatever templating language, testing framework or ORM you like, and there will be others who made the same choice you can look to for support. It's still opinionated about defaults, but you can switch out whatever libraries you like these days, for the most part.
overgard 15y ago
As a Python user, I'll give my personal reason for using Python over Ruby. Upfront: I think Ruby is absolutely fantastic. It's a very elegant language. In a lot of ways I think it's cleaner than python. I'd love to use it. Except... Every interpreter I've tried is just too slow. I recently ported over a networking library I wrote in python to ruby, and the requests per second (CPU limited in this case, since it was talking over a loopback socket -- this was just a test of how fast data could be serialized/deserialized) dropped from 7000 requests/sec in python to 120 in ruby. And that was just with standard CPython. Under PyPy, I was able to process about 20,000 requests/sec after letting the JIT warm up. I realize it's sort of silly to choose a dynamically typed interpreted language on the grounds of performance when you're already giving up so much performance regardless, but in my mind python hits the sweet spot of "just fast enough for most things I need to do", and with all other things being roughly equal (which, in my opinion, they roughly are), being an order of a magnitude factor faster wins out.
- biafra 15y ago
  Did you give JRuby a try?
  - overgard 15y ago
    I didn't. Perhaps I should, but it seemed like it would have to be at least 10x faster than YARV to be worth it, which looking at the benchmarks seemed unlikely (but who knows? maybe I was hitting some sort of interpreter specific bottleneck)
    - attractivechaos 15y ago
      For some tasks, JRuby is faster than python and for others, it is slower, but the difference is not big. PyPy is significantly faster in most cases than both.
- jshen 15y ago
  Is this code public?
wging 15y ago
I should probably point out that the bit I put in single quotes is not a verbatim quote.
petercooper 15y ago
A key difference is that Ruby picks one paradigm (object oriented programming) and sticks with it (to a fault, potentially) whereas Python takes a multiple paradigm approach and various styles tend to be mixed together even in the best of conditions (consider len(str) vs str.length). You can attempt to ignore OO in Ruby but it's not recommended and under the hood, everything you're doing is forced into an OO paradigm anyway.
rue 15y ago
> As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most languages, what am I missing? Nothing. Everyone jokes about turing completeness, but Ruby and Python are pretty much exactly equivalent for their users. Python's got the upper hand in some areas, Ruby in others, but you'll get it done. If Python works for you, use it. I didn't like it, the object model/runtime never felt right[1]. Ruby's did, it's internally consistent. [1] The classic len(str), the underscored methods, recently decorators…
njharman 15y ago
If the distance between Ruby and Python is the Moon and Earth. Then the distance between Ruby/Python and any other common language is the Earth and Sun. You aren't missing much, comparatively.
chaostheory 15y ago
I've used both. What you're missing out on is a better ecosystem of libraries and a community that communicates more and better than Python's imho.

by wging 15y ago

Game_Ender 15y ago

In my opinion Ruby has a slightly more obscure syntax with custom symbols, and it's C API is not as clean and well put together as Python's.

16s 15y ago
Which is more obscure? Reverse a string in ruby: string.reverse() Reverse a string in python: string[::-1]
- evincarofautumn 15y ago
  Slice syntax in Python always bothered me. This would be slightly more readable: ''.join(reversed(string)) Except it requires you to have an idea of how iteration works (beginners don’t) and why that “join” needs to be there, and it’s still an order of magnitude slower. But hey. Ruby is prettier in some ways, Python in others, and beggars, as they say, can’t be choosers.
  - 16s 15y ago
    Way way slower than the slicing.
- TylerE 15y ago
  What an odd example. Other than perhaps a palindrome detector, I'm having a really hard time coming up with a use for a reversed-strings. Python DOES provide a reverse for arrays.

elektronaut 15y ago

I think you could pretty much substitute Python and Django with Ruby and Rails, and the article would still ring true. As a Ruby developer I've only had brief encounters with Python, but to me it seems like a language I would love for the same reasons I like Ruby.

espeed 15y ago

Library support. For example, there really is no Ruby equivalent to SciPy, NumPy, Matplotlib or NLTK (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3179370 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3179370). However, there has been some effort in the Ruby community to begin the process of developing some of these libraries (see SciRuby http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3180369 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3180369). but the Python libraries have been in development for years so this will be no easy feat.

berntb 15y ago
>> Library support. Isn't that rather an argument for Java or Perl? What I don't get is the cheerleading for Python? Ruby has/had something similar going with Rails. I mean, the article even notes that it is a middle of the road choice, optimised to not be extreme.
- pjscott 15y ago
  It's an argument for any language that has libraries available, weighted by your need for those particular libraries and their quality.
  - achompas 15y ago
    Right, in addition to the usual efficiency concerns (can you afford that 0.5-1s of JVM spinup? do you need mature multiprocessing libraries?)
- espeed 15y ago
  Yes, Java and Perl have large libraries, but wging asked what he would be missing going from Python to Ruby -- missing libraries is the big one.
- pbreit 15y ago
  No, it's an argument for python over ruby.
- amcintyre 15y ago

hello_moto 15y ago

That depends on your taste buds. Mine prefer consistency. Ruby is a alippery slope when it comes to consistency and it requires the whole community to change certain attitudes.

jimbokun 15y ago
Ruby seems more consistent to me, as it follows the "everything is an object" design principle quite rigorously. Python does not have any consistent design principle like that at its core, as far as I can tell.
- hello_moto 15y ago
  This is something that I struggle a lot between Ruby, Python, and JavaScript. Ruby/JS everything "is an object" is definitely consistent when it comes to "design principle". But somehow I just can't grok/remember/stick to my head every time I read Ruby/JS code. I suppose as a user, I'm more concern with the readability (a.k.a coding style) more than the "everything is an object".

masklinn 15y ago

The downside of Ruby is the third-party packages, especially advanced/industrial-strength stuff (NumPy/SciPy for instance). The main upside of Ruby is blocks, however limited (compared to Smalltalk's) the ability to craft your own control structures is incredibly powerful and empowering (and you can't really do that in Python, you can abuse decorators for it nowadays but it's not exactly sexy or readable, or generally a good idea) Ruby also makes metaprogramming easier and more common, though the jury's still out on whether it's a good thing or not.

jshen 15y ago
I'd also say that ruby has done a better job of moving forward. Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. I think JRuby is more mature than jpython, and I know this will start the flames, but I think ruby is clearly better for web stuff; not just rails, but the whole ecosystem. Edit: I also think bundler is better than what is going on in python land.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. They're not comparable, so no. > I think JRuby is more mature than jpython Pretty different situations, from 2006 to 2009 two lead JRuby developers were hired specifically for that by Sun (later left for EngineYard) and a third was hired by ThoughtWorks for the same. For Jython this only happened in 2008, after the project had pretty much gone on freeze due to the original founder leaving to work on the Pypy project. Compare IronPython to IronRuby instead, and the situation is reversed. Same if you compare Rubinius and Pypy. > and I know this will start the flames, but I think ruby is clearly better for web stuff That's your personal judgement, I don't agree.
  - jshen 15y ago
    You dodged the first two issues. Python 3 is causing serious pain, does django work with it yet? Second, who cares why JRuby is more mature, it is.
    - 15y ago

alinajaf 15y ago

I'm an extremely happy ruby user but have nothing against python, it's just that the languages operate at such a similar level of abstraction that it seems like a bit of a waste to spend time learning python when I could be learning C or Haskell. FWIW though, I get serious library envy, especially with regard to NLTK. Ruby has web development cornered but is decades behind python when it comes to anything around machine learning and scientific computing.

pwang 15y ago
> Ruby has web development cornered but is decades behind python when it comes to anything around machine learning and scientific computing. The irony of this is that many folks in the Python scientific computing space pine for better syntax extension facilities so that they could do more "natural" DSLs for data analysis and embedding math inside Python code. The object lesson here is that communities and passionate users matter. Python took root in some scientific computing environments and certain dedicated individuals built up a software library and invested in growing a community that is now a force to be reckoned with. If the same people had all chosen Ruby and built a community around that, there is no obvious reason why Ruby shouldn't be the one with the great scientific libraries.

wcarss 15y ago

Ruby's blocks and built in regular-expressions are two examples of things you're missing. if result =~ /regex/ that kind of thing is awesome for readability, but it can also be pretty darn slow. There's also some interesting things about the ruby object model and interpreter that are different from python's approach. Whereas in the python REPL you type help(object) to get the docs on that object, in ruby you type object.methods or object.public_methods, etc. It's less documentation oriented, and more code-exploration oriented, but the two end up delivering the same sort of information. Hope that's helpful! Ruby's a lot of fun to tool around with, and there are (in my opinion) fewer things about it to trip you up completely than there are when first learning python. But once you use it for a while and get beyond the basics, it becomes clear that there's a lot of unfocused cruft foating about, which fits no rhyme nor reason. Much more than Python has. (cautionary note: I'm not an expert with either language)

shazow 15y ago
Have a look at IPython for a more code-exploration oriented experience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipython http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipython (Sadly the homepage doesn't quite get the simpler sell points across as well. http://ipython.org/ http://ipython.org/)
maxerickson 15y ago
It sounds like object.public_methods and object.methods are a lot like dir(object) in python.
zem 15y ago
ruby does have its share of cruft, but it also has some inspired features that make a far bigger difference than you'd think they would. blocks are the biggest (specifically, syntactic support for attaching a lexical closure to every method call, which the object can choose to use or not), but here's another cute one: the case statement case object when matcher1; ... when matcher2; ... end performs a method call on the matchers, with the object as an argument, rather than vice versa. so you can say things like case name when "John Smith"; puts "hello again" when / Smith$/; puts "are you related to john?" end the string "John Smith" and the regexp / Smith$/ will each call a different matcher to see if they match your name - a far cleaner design than the string class having to provide matchers for everything you might want to use in a case statement.

nO0b 15y ago

Blocks. Ruby gets a lot of things wrong, but blocks are one thing they more or less do well. Everything good that has been built from/for Ruby owes a large measure of its success to Ruby's block implementation. Python programmers are definitely looking up the power curve at Ruby.

tripzilch 15y ago

Some many years ago I decided I should learn a new scripting language because PHP wasn't general-purpose enough. I decided it would be either Python, Ruby or Perl. For some reason Perl was dropped early, I forget why (don't worry I learned some Perl later). So I started Googling for Python vs Ruby. After checking some language basics tutorials, I decided that really, for my purposes they were about equivalent in power (didn't know much about library support yet). The one thing that pushed me towards Python was that most articles I could find comparing Ruby and Python were written by a happy user of one of these languages. However, all Python users wrote something like "I guess you can do everything in either of them, it's just a matter of preference and I happen to have picked Python", while the Ruby users tended to be somewhat more flaming and arrogant about it, especially in the comments sections. In the end I went with Python because the community seemed more friendly. However, I stayed for the library support. Especially after that one time I installed pyTwitter and I could just do `import twitter`, I was pretty impressed by that (I assume Ruby has an excellent Twitter lib too, btw). Also, just a little disclaimer: This was a couple of years back (I forget how many, 5 or so) maybe the Ruby community changed, and it's also totally possible that I just happened to land on a rather "particular" region of the Ruby blogosphere, so take this cum grano salis. I had to make a choice and was about this close to just flipping a coin over it :)

jamesbritt 15y ago
Also, just a little disclaimer: This was a couple of years back (I forget how many, 5 or so) maybe the Ruby community changed, and it's also totally possible that I just happened to land on a rather "particular" region of the Ruby blogosphere, so take this cum grano salis. I had to make a choice and was about this close to just flipping a coin over it :) ruby-talk used to have, as one of a number of perma-threads, the question of "Why Ruby over Python". The discussion was almost always entirely civil, with most people suggesting that the questioner try both for a bit and pick the one that clicked best. I used to host (on ruby-doc.org) a page called "Ruby Eye for the Python Guy" that tried to summarise the comments and offer links to help folks make a decision. The community on ruby-talk at that time (probably 5 years ago) was extremely polite and helpful, and I'm sorry you landed on some opinionated blog that likely only reflected a small group of developers. I don't follow ruby-talk much any more, so I can't say how it is, but there has always been a pretty strong tradition of MINSWAN: "matz is nice so we are nice." I expect that's still encouraged. There are, of course, various sub-groups around this or that library or framework that may have zero exposure to that, think they're the shit, etc., but I hope people considering Ruby don't a priori dismiss the majority of Rubyists as rude because of bad reports about a handful of people. OK, end of Ruby PSA. Side note: I'm often puzzled by people who think a language or framework or whatever geek thing has to "win." Be happy for happy people.

thehotelambush 15y ago

I used Python for a really long time and switched to Ruby several months ago. Benefits of Ruby are: -no distinction between expression and statement (everything has a value) -lambdas can thus contain any expression -much bigger range of built-in methods and classes (all permutations of a list, removing duplicates from a list, Rational class, Regexp class, Range class, etc.) -more flexible syntax and "control operators" like each_with_index -almost zero distinction between built-in classes and methods and user-written ones: you can open up Hash (dict) or Array (list) and extend it straightforwardly. Downsides are: -generally uglier and more ambiguous syntax -distinction between functions and methods (b/c "all you can do is send a message") leads to a lot of unnecessary duplication of concepts -so-called "blocks" which are really just a hack to avoid writing the word "lambda" a bunch of times (maybe if the more concise Ruby 1.9 syntax for lambdas had existed earlier blocks wouldn't have been implemented). I think they are based on the idea that most HOFs only require one functional argument, and they encourage functional programming, but they (along with the last bullet point) discourage the general case. They provide some of the functionality of macros. -you can't define a class inside a method (still haven't quite figured out the reasoning behind this one). In general Ruby is definitely more powerful than Python, but in its higher ambitions suffers more obviously from clashes between functional and OO programming. Python's dogmatic insistence on "readability" makes it feel like an old grandma in comparison to Ruby.

codesuela 15y ago
> -lambdas can thus contain any expression why would you want to use lambdas if you have generator expressions? eg: map(lambda c: c.strip(), countries.split(',')) vs [c.strip() for c in countries.split(',')] IMHO the latter one is way more readable and generators cover almost all the use cases for lambdas. If you could not do it with a generator expression and choose to use a anonymous function it should have been a method anyway. > -much bigger range of built-in methods and classes (all permutations of a list, removing duplicates from a list, Rational class, Regexp class, Range class, etc.) you mean sets, dictionaries(hashtables) etc.? those are built in as well in Python. Remove duplicates: mylist = list(set(mylist)) Range class: [i for i in range(10)] you can import the rational class via a simple from fractions import Fraction same for regex > -more flexible syntax and "control operators" like each_with_index you can iterate over dictionaries with for k,v in dict.items() if you need the index of a list you can use for i,v in enumerate(list) personally I don't think there is much of a difference between Python and Ruby. One is more mature the other is way hipper and it comes down personal taste which one you choose.

cheald 15y ago

Ruby is Python's slutty sister. She's just as hot, but she'll let you do things to her that Python would dump you for even trying.

bconway 15y ago

As the author points out, a huge standard library. Sure, Ruby has everything you need if you pull in this gem and that gem, but you better hope the gem you need is working that week or you're going to waste a lot of time reading Github logs and back-tracking revisions.

chernevik 15y ago

Ruby/Rails seems to have a more developer-friendly approach to the web development stack than Python/Django. (I am but an egg, more comfortable in Python/Django but learning Ruby/Rails, I wouldn't argue with more experienced folks about any of the following.) Ruby/Rails seems easier to develop and test the full stack application, from client JavaScript to server Ruby response and back. It supports Ajax through injection of injection of JavaScript into HTTP responses served up, based on specifications in server side code. The test architectures seem to reach across the client/server divide, for example checking server side responses to triggering client-side JavaScript. Python/Django are trying, with like lettuce and splinter, but these don't yet seem to be quite to the same standard. Also, because RoR has a lead on web development, new developments in that space seem generally better integrated. For example, Backbone is a young JavaScript MVC style framework for client side development. I've just been fooling with using it with Django, and discovered that its stringification of Json objects for POST doesn't work with Django's parsing of the client request. Maybe more experienced developers spotted and fixed this easily -- my fix is only a couple of lines -- but it's the sort of thing that makes me wonder just how many folks have tried to integrate Django w/ Backbone. I'm guessing that the Backbone community has already spotted and fixed any such issues with RoR. Now I'm not sure how I feel about RoR, it often feels like magic and I'm a little suspicious of stuff like super-convenient JavaScript injection. Maybe when I understand it better it will seems less magical and more convenient. But it isn't hard to see why the web development community likes it.

funksta 15y ago
One of the differences between Django and Rails is that the former makes almost no assumptions about how you are going to write your front end. I don't know much about Rails, but it seems to me that it is much more opinionated in that regard. Re: Django & Backbone, you should check out djangbone. It makes it dead simple to create a basic backbone-compatible APIs in Django, and is easy to extend if you need more advanced functionality (full disclosure- I'm its author): https://github.com/af/djangbone https://github.com/af/djangbone
alinajaf 15y ago
RE: javascript injection, it's totally optional and in years of doing rails dev work I've never used it (I presume you're talking about the 'remote' option). Actually, the vast majority of my rails stuff recently has been RESTish (or at least Backbone compatible) json endpoints with a CoffeeScript frontend. The front and back end in that case are totally decoupled (though rails does do some nice things to help you organize your frontend code). This would have been hard a few years ago but I've found that as time has wore on rails has become quite a bit more forgiving when you disagree with DHH, e.g.. you can use whatever templating language, testing framework or ORM you like, and there will be others who made the same choice you can look to for support. It's still opinionated about defaults, but you can switch out whatever libraries you like these days, for the most part.

overgard 15y ago

As a Python user, I'll give my personal reason for using Python over Ruby. Upfront: I think Ruby is absolutely fantastic. It's a very elegant language. In a lot of ways I think it's cleaner than python. I'd love to use it. Except... Every interpreter I've tried is just too slow. I recently ported over a networking library I wrote in python to ruby, and the requests per second (CPU limited in this case, since it was talking over a loopback socket -- this was just a test of how fast data could be serialized/deserialized) dropped from 7000 requests/sec in python to 120 in ruby. And that was just with standard CPython. Under PyPy, I was able to process about 20,000 requests/sec after letting the JIT warm up. I realize it's sort of silly to choose a dynamically typed interpreted language on the grounds of performance when you're already giving up so much performance regardless, but in my mind python hits the sweet spot of "just fast enough for most things I need to do", and with all other things being roughly equal (which, in my opinion, they roughly are), being an order of a magnitude factor faster wins out.

biafra 15y ago
Did you give JRuby a try?
- overgard 15y ago
  I didn't. Perhaps I should, but it seemed like it would have to be at least 10x faster than YARV to be worth it, which looking at the benchmarks seemed unlikely (but who knows? maybe I was hitting some sort of interpreter specific bottleneck)
  - attractivechaos 15y ago
    For some tasks, JRuby is faster than python and for others, it is slower, but the difference is not big. PyPy is significantly faster in most cases than both.
jshen 15y ago
Is this code public?

wging 15y ago

I should probably point out that the bit I put in single quotes is not a verbatim quote.

petercooper 15y ago

A key difference is that Ruby picks one paradigm (object oriented programming) and sticks with it (to a fault, potentially) whereas Python takes a multiple paradigm approach and various styles tend to be mixed together even in the best of conditions (consider len(str) vs str.length). You can attempt to ignore OO in Ruby but it's not recommended and under the hood, everything you're doing is forced into an OO paradigm anyway.

rue 15y ago

> As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most languages, what am I missing? Nothing. Everyone jokes about turing completeness, but Ruby and Python are pretty much exactly equivalent for their users. Python's got the upper hand in some areas, Ruby in others, but you'll get it done. If Python works for you, use it. I didn't like it, the object model/runtime never felt right[1]. Ruby's did, it's internally consistent. [1] The classic len(str), the underscored methods, recently decorators…

njharman 15y ago

If the distance between Ruby and Python is the Moon and Earth. Then the distance between Ruby/Python and any other common language is the Earth and Sun. You aren't missing much, comparatively.

chaostheory 15y ago

I've used both. What you're missing out on is a better ecosystem of libraries and a community that communicates more and better than Python's imho.