I've been a Ruby (Rails) developer for about 4-5 years now, I guess. After a job change about a year ago, I've been thrown around to various different projects

I've been a Ruby (Rails) developer for about 4-5 years now, I guess. After a job change about a year ago, I've been thrown around to various different projects--I was mostly doing Sinatra stuff until earlier this year, but about four months ago I started working with Python (2.7). I'll say right off the bat: I don't think my experience is really enough to judge an entire community on. I also feel pretty strongly--as I've read a bunch of articles on Python from a number of perspectives while learning about it--that there are a variety of perspectives within the Python community, some more conservative, some less. In fact, it may be harder to characterize the Python community with a broad brush than the Ruby community (although I live in Japan, and meeting some of the old-school Japanese Ruby coders shifts your perspective a lot...but that's another story). What I will say, however, is that there are aspects of the community that correspond very much to the stereotypes. More to the point, there are folks who use the talking points within the Python community as an excuse for really foolish practices. For example, I work with a developer who insists that you should do your damnedest to use nothing outside of the standard Python library. So he ends up writing his own web framework from scratch (!) rather than using Django, or anything really--we are on raw webob/webapp2. This has something to do with, in his words, "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." He will also turn code into long blocks of if/else statements because he insists this is easier to grasp; and Python code should be readable..."Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex." Etc. etc. The Ruby community has its own normative qualities, I won't deny (I...kinda agree with Zed Shaw: http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html). But my experience roughly corresponds to the original article's perspective: Ruby, as a community, tends to have a more forward thinking, "break it and fix it quick" perspective. And as far as Rails at least, testing is entrenched, which I think is a good thing. Generally speaking, experimentation is good, and conservatism can get stuffed. I don't think Python is a bad language. But I personally think having these philosophical statements like "the Zen of Python" and "Pythonic" and whatnot is actually poisonous to the community as a whole. It promotes a certain type of dogmatic thinking that I think is really harmful--even if the ideas expressed are correct! It becomes easy for bad programmers (or good ones who haven't had their ass kicked in a while) to fall back on when they don't feel like challenging themselves. Also, this is kind of neither here nor there but functional programming paradigms in Python suck. Well, maybe 3.x is better, I haven't really checked it out in depth yet... (Edit: sorry that last bit about functional programming in Python was a cheap shot, with no bearing on the conversation at hand...)