5 ms·

Not denying Ruby is good, but other than process forking, why should I prefer it to Python?

• katbyte 2y ago
  Not using white space as a delimiter
  • ianschmitz 2y ago
    Ruby is surprisingly picky with white space
    • manume 2y ago
      Can you give an example? I can't think of a single situation where whitespace matters in Ruby (unless of course you forget to put a space between two commands or something silly).
      • codesnik 2y ago
        if foo is a method then `foo + bar` and `foo+bar` are `foo()+bar`, but `foo +bar` is `foo(+bar)` ternary ? : also has some interesting whitespace dependent mixups with symbols, but I cannot remember what. I think that parser has many gotchas like that, but they are really really rare to bite you, because ruby's magic follows human intuition as much as possible.
        • p_l 2y ago
          still less annoying than Python's semantic whitespace
      • ezrast 2y ago
        It's not really a problem in practice (and I love Ruby), but it's still wild to me that they made the parser do this: $ irb irb(main):001:0> def foo(x=70) = x => :foo irb(main):002:0> i = 2 => 2 irb(main):003:0> foo / 5/i => 7 irb(main):004:0> foo /5/i => /5/i
    • katbyte 2y ago
      Yea but it’s still not a delimiter
• corytheboyd 2y ago
  It’s just preference at that point IMO, and I’d base it off “what language are the rest of the scripts using?”.
• manume 2y ago
  For 99% of use cases (especially when writing shell scripts) it doesn't matter, just pick the one you know better. Both are nicer than Bash though. :)
• cyclotron3k 2y ago
  Personally, I find Ruby's syntax more natural, (I'm going to be heavily biased though, having written Ruby for 10+ years). But for example, let's say I wanted to make a hash (dict) of files, keyed by their size (for some unknown reason), in Ruby it would look like: Pathname.glob('*').filter { |f| f.file? }.each_with_object({}) { |f, h| h[f.size] = f } Whereas the equivalent Python would be: result = {} for file_path in glob.glob('*'): if os.path.isfile(file_path): result[os.path.getsize(file_path)] = file_path Or capitalizing a string in Ruby: string.split(' ').map(&:capitalize).join(' ') And in Python: words = string.split(' ') capitalized_words = [word.capitalize() for word in words] result = ' '.join(capitalized_words) Python seems to be more convoluted and verbose to me, and requires more explicit variable declarations too. With the Ruby you can literally read left to right and know what it does, but with the Python, I find I have to jump about a bit to grok what's going on. But maybe that's just my lack of Python experience showing.
  • ndand 2y ago
    You can capitalize a string in Python using functional style ' '.join(map(str.capitalize, string.split(' '))) which is similar to the example in Ruby, except the operations are written in reverse order.
  • pseudalopex 2y ago
    result = {os.path.getsize(f): f for f in os.listdir() if os.path.isfile(f)} result = ' '.join(word.capitalize() for word in string.split(' ')) result = ' '.join(map(str.capitalize, string.split(' '))) result = string.title()
  • sgarland 2y ago
    from string import capwords result = capwords(string) This does the split/capitalize/join dance, all in one. The file example you gave could also be turned into a dict comprehension if desired. I’m on mobile, but I think this would work. result = { f:os.path.getsize(f) for f in glob.glob(“*”) if os.path.isfile(f) }