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Kinda side-topic, but: why do most "hacker advice" tend to recommend Python over Ruby or Perl (ok, Perl is "just old") as a beginner's scripting language? I lov

by nnq 14y ago

Kinda side-topic, but: why do most "hacker advice" tend to recommend Python over Ruby or Perl (ok, Perl is "just old") as a beginner's scripting language? I love Python and I like using it in production better than Ruby, but Ruby is much more of a "hacker's language" and pushes you to more "lispyness" in spirit and practice! (I admit I'am a bit of a Python ecosystem fanboy, with all the cool and easy to use machine learning tools and libs, but this state of affairs is a bit unintuitive - and I'm looking at this types of questions from a language designer's perspective too as I'm working on a language that has 99.9% chances of not tacking over the world, but that 0.1% is enough to "make me high" and keeps me banging my hammers on until I get to something that I can show to the world).

wuest 14y ago
Most "hacker advice" articles are old. Ruby hasn't been popular for all that long (I started hacking in it circa 2004, and I was a very early adopter, on the broader scale).
Xion 14y ago
> (...) but Ruby is much more of a "hacker's language" and pushes you to more "lispyness" in spirit and practice! Which, I think, is one of the main reasons why Python is recommended more: it's simpler and has less sharp corners. The other thing is that Ruby is significantly slanted towards the object-oriented paradigm while Python remains much more neutral in this regard.
3pt14159 14y ago
Python is more powerful than Ruby. You have more meta-programming options available to you and a far, far wider scope of tools (scipy, etc). Python also naturally can lead you to c/c++ through cython as well as idiomatically functional programming (partials, function passing, decorators) far easier than Ruby (since in ruby parans are optional).
- nnq 14y ago
  > as well as idiomatically functional programming Intuitive as this may seem, it ends up being the opposite: you'll see more "functional-like" code in Ruby codebases. A simple think like Guido considering multi-line lambdas "a Rube Goldberg language feature" [1] and rejecting them was sort of a butterfly effect that pushed real-world ruby codebases away from functional programming. Same as the nice-looking block passing syntax pushed Ruby in the opposite direction! And makes Ruby DSLs easy as pie (though I find DSLs a bit against the "hacker spirit" - any tool that's less "general purposes" ends up "limiting your mind" - take Rails which is a giant "meta-DSL for web apps" imho). ...though I still recommend Python to wannabe "hackers" for the same reasons you said above, I find myself, as a "real-world hacker", enjoying Ruby more. [1] http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358
  - nnq 14y ago
    BUG: it's "python" not "ruby" in "pushed real-world ruby codebases"

by nnq 14y ago

wuest 14y ago

Most "hacker advice" articles are old. Ruby hasn't been popular for all that long (I started hacking in it circa 2004, and I was a very early adopter, on the broader scale).

Xion 14y ago

> (...) but Ruby is much more of a "hacker's language" and pushes you to more "lispyness" in spirit and practice! Which, I think, is one of the main reasons why Python is recommended more: it's simpler and has less sharp corners. The other thing is that Ruby is significantly slanted towards the object-oriented paradigm while Python remains much more neutral in this regard.

3pt14159 14y ago

Python is more powerful than Ruby. You have more meta-programming options available to you and a far, far wider scope of tools (scipy, etc). Python also naturally can lead you to c/c++ through cython as well as idiomatically functional programming (partials, function passing, decorators) far easier than Ruby (since in ruby parans are optional).

nnq 14y ago
> as well as idiomatically functional programming Intuitive as this may seem, it ends up being the opposite: you'll see more "functional-like" code in Ruby codebases. A simple think like Guido considering multi-line lambdas "a Rube Goldberg language feature" [1] and rejecting them was sort of a butterfly effect that pushed real-world ruby codebases away from functional programming. Same as the nice-looking block passing syntax pushed Ruby in the opposite direction! And makes Ruby DSLs easy as pie (though I find DSLs a bit against the "hacker spirit" - any tool that's less "general purposes" ends up "limiting your mind" - take Rails which is a giant "meta-DSL for web apps" imho). ...though I still recommend Python to wannabe "hackers" for the same reasons you said above, I find myself, as a "real-world hacker", enjoying Ruby more. [1] http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358
- nnq 14y ago
  BUG: it's "python" not "ruby" in "pushed real-world ruby codebases"