4 ms·

...strange ad-hoc combination of other languages. I call bullshit, sir. Ruby is objectively less strange and more consistent than Python. Some has to do with t

by jimmyrr 17y ago

...strange ad-hoc combination of other languages. I call bullshit, sir. Ruby is objectively less strange and more consistent than Python. Some has to do with the fact that Python is older - hence has more baggage to carry. A lot of it, though, just has to do with poor/missing design choices. Specifics? - ruby 'block' passing convention is much cleaner and more powerful than python's 'for'/iterators. - python's global functions are stranger and more ad-hoc than Ruby's strict object-orientation. - ruby's mixins > python's multiple inheritance - python underscore (and double underscore) naming conventions to overcome simple language features Don't get me wrong: i love python - but primarily because of the faster execution and larger community - not because of the language itself.

yangyang 17y ago
I have used both, Python more than Ruby. Python's iterators are more usable in many situations than the Ruby block system. I can return an iterator, stick it in a variable, call another function with it that returns another iterator, and so on. Python's classes also seem cleaner and less magical than Ruby's. For example, a method on a class is just an attribute that happens to be a method. Much more intuitive than Ruby in my opinion. I'm also fond of Python's idea that "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it". I agree that Python does have its fair share of strangeness, but that fades away with time (you don't notice it).
- wildjim 17y ago
  Everything is an object in Ruby, including the blocks. I'm not clear how you can't pass around a block -- or is it the block + iterator metadata you're talking about? I suspect that's just an experience problem, where Python promotes iterators over lambdas so lends itself to a different style of programming; I'm not sure how often you'd want/need to pass a full iterator around in Ruby. Personally I find blocks far more intuitive than Python's iterators and generators, but that is a subjective thing. WRT Magical Classes, I'm not a fan of everything being stored in a dict. It seems grossly under-engineered to expose the underbelly as a basic "dumb" object; at the very least, it should've been a "Class Metadata" object with attached support methods to make it easier (safer?) to inspect or update. And lastly: there is NEVER just one way to do it!! Witness the confusion n00b's feel over the join() method: ",".join([LIST]) where the more intuitive would probably be [LIST].join(",")... but if you MUST have join() in the string module, why not support the latter as a redirect to the former? Seriously: this sort of dogma can make certain kinds of algorithms very messy to code. However, my biggest beef with Python is that I seem to have to write a metric buttload of boilerplate and end up with something very Java-esque... <sigh>
  - yangyang 17y ago
    It might well be experience, I haven't used ruby a great deal. I wanted to do something similar to izip in Python and couldn't see a way to do that without constructing lists in Ruby. I completely disagree with having to write lots of boilerplate and java-esque code. I've written huge amounts of Python, and seeing Java after that really made me wince. What does Python lack that makes you feel you need boilerplate? I don't think the one-way-to-do-it thing is that dogmatic, really. It does make code nicer when you don't have to be aware of various aliased methods, and there are less ways of making identical code look different.
  - cbr 17y ago
    You can do ", ".join(x) on any x that you can do "for y in x" on. If join were a method of the list (or sequence, or iterator, ...) then it would need to be defined over and over again.
    - earthboundkid 17y ago
      Or it would have to inherit the method from a common iterator class. Which gets to the heart of the Ruby/Python thing: In Python inheritance just isn't as stressed, since people prefer duck-typing to isinstance. On the other hand, since you can reopen classes in Ruby, it's not as crazy to use the modification of a common base class as a means of making a method work with a wide variety of object types.
  - pwang 17y ago
    Under what circumstances have you had to write a "metric buttload of boilerplate"? I've not encountered this with Python in my experience.
- sreque 17y ago
  Ruby 1.9 has real iterators now.
  - Freaky 17y ago
    They're in 1.8 now too: >> [1,2,3].each => #<Enumerable::Enumerator:0x801820f10> >> RUBY_VERSION => "1.8.7"
    - stephencelis 17y ago
      They've been around for awhile >> RUBY_VERSION => "1.8" >> require "enumerator" => true >> [1,2,3].each => #<Enumerable::Enumerator:0x29326940>
tdavis 17y ago
Quoting an article on the topic: Having ploughed through several tutorials, I did not find Ruby particularly "elegant", or its syntax particularly obvious. Much of it seemed ad hoc, thrown together, in particular when there were several different ways of doing something, and it seemed to be the philosophy of the language to provide all of them. I did not find its constructs as intuitive and natural as claimed, trying out simple coding examples proved as frustrating when things didn’t do what you’d suppose they’d do... (http://www.bitwisemag.com/2/What-s-Wrong-With-Ruby http://www.bitwisemag.com/2/What-s-Wrong-With-Ruby) I actually gave Ruby a shot, going through the interactive tutorial on http://tryruby.hobix.com http://tryruby.hobix.com. I couldn't do it very long, however, because it was completely ridiculous. In what world does it make sense for hash keys to double as string grep? For instance: my_string['foo'] = 'bar' will replace the first instance of foo in my_string with bar?! WHY?! I can stick an exclamation point on the end of method calls... to signify mutation? WHY?! What twisted logic allows one to rationalize multiplying strings like: "5" * 2 == "55" yet throw an exception for: 2 * "5" It makes absolutely no sense! And why would an integer have a method for converting itself to a string? Or an array? I found so many things in Ruby that made me think, "Okay, superficially that's really convenient and sorta cool... but it makes no sense and it is absolutely counter-intuitive. And I feel dirty using it, even if everybody is doing it." Some people, I assume, find Ruby to be "elegant" for the same reasons I find it to be "an abomination."
- demallien 17y ago
  Well, I can answer at least a few of those 'WHY?!'s. Firstly starting with my_string['foo'] = 'bar', this is a syntax that is used a lot in Ruby for anytime that you wish to recover a subset of a collection - you can use it with a Dir object for example to recover a subset of directories/files, or in the case of a hash, to recover the object stored at the key. The thing is that you need to think about it as being a subset operator, rather than an index operator. The exclamation point at the end of a method name has no syntactic meaning - it is simply a naming convention used by the standard libraries to indicate when the method mutates the object or not. Same same for method names ending with a question mark, it's just a convention to indicate that the response will be a boolean. As for the whole "5" * 2 vs. 2 * "5", I must admit to not understanding where you're coming from. I don't see how you could expect any other kind of behaviour from an object orientated language. Personally I don't like over-riding arithmetic operators for non-number types, for precisely this reason, but hey, some people like it, so why not? Integers converting to strings? I think every language has that no? I mean there's always something like: sprintf(myStringPtr, "%d", myInteger); or cout << myInteger; etc etc By making this a standard method on all classes (to_s), Ruby makes it really easy to dump a class to a serial format, which is very useful for debugging, as an example. I get the impression that you simply didn't spend enough time with Ruby to come to understand its idioms, in which case, you're not really in a position to effectively criticise the language...

by jimmyrr 17y ago

yangyang 17y ago

I have used both, Python more than Ruby. Python's iterators are more usable in many situations than the Ruby block system. I can return an iterator, stick it in a variable, call another function with it that returns another iterator, and so on. Python's classes also seem cleaner and less magical than Ruby's. For example, a method on a class is just an attribute that happens to be a method. Much more intuitive than Ruby in my opinion. I'm also fond of Python's idea that "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it". I agree that Python does have its fair share of strangeness, but that fades away with time (you don't notice it).

wildjim 17y ago
Everything is an object in Ruby, including the blocks. I'm not clear how you can't pass around a block -- or is it the block + iterator metadata you're talking about? I suspect that's just an experience problem, where Python promotes iterators over lambdas so lends itself to a different style of programming; I'm not sure how often you'd want/need to pass a full iterator around in Ruby. Personally I find blocks far more intuitive than Python's iterators and generators, but that is a subjective thing. WRT Magical Classes, I'm not a fan of everything being stored in a dict. It seems grossly under-engineered to expose the underbelly as a basic "dumb" object; at the very least, it should've been a "Class Metadata" object with attached support methods to make it easier (safer?) to inspect or update. And lastly: there is NEVER just one way to do it!! Witness the confusion n00b's feel over the join() method: ",".join([LIST]) where the more intuitive would probably be [LIST].join(",")... but if you MUST have join() in the string module, why not support the latter as a redirect to the former? Seriously: this sort of dogma can make certain kinds of algorithms very messy to code. However, my biggest beef with Python is that I seem to have to write a metric buttload of boilerplate and end up with something very Java-esque... <sigh>
- yangyang 17y ago
  It might well be experience, I haven't used ruby a great deal. I wanted to do something similar to izip in Python and couldn't see a way to do that without constructing lists in Ruby. I completely disagree with having to write lots of boilerplate and java-esque code. I've written huge amounts of Python, and seeing Java after that really made me wince. What does Python lack that makes you feel you need boilerplate? I don't think the one-way-to-do-it thing is that dogmatic, really. It does make code nicer when you don't have to be aware of various aliased methods, and there are less ways of making identical code look different.
- cbr 17y ago
  You can do ", ".join(x) on any x that you can do "for y in x" on. If join were a method of the list (or sequence, or iterator, ...) then it would need to be defined over and over again.
  - earthboundkid 17y ago
    Or it would have to inherit the method from a common iterator class. Which gets to the heart of the Ruby/Python thing: In Python inheritance just isn't as stressed, since people prefer duck-typing to isinstance. On the other hand, since you can reopen classes in Ruby, it's not as crazy to use the modification of a common base class as a means of making a method work with a wide variety of object types.
- pwang 17y ago
  Under what circumstances have you had to write a "metric buttload of boilerplate"? I've not encountered this with Python in my experience.
sreque 17y ago
Ruby 1.9 has real iterators now.
- Freaky 17y ago
  They're in 1.8 now too: >> [1,2,3].each => #<Enumerable::Enumerator:0x801820f10> >> RUBY_VERSION => "1.8.7"
  - stephencelis 17y ago
    They've been around for awhile >> RUBY_VERSION => "1.8" >> require "enumerator" => true >> [1,2,3].each => #<Enumerable::Enumerator:0x29326940>

tdavis 17y ago

Quoting an article on the topic: Having ploughed through several tutorials, I did not find Ruby particularly "elegant", or its syntax particularly obvious. Much of it seemed ad hoc, thrown together, in particular when there were several different ways of doing something, and it seemed to be the philosophy of the language to provide all of them. I did not find its constructs as intuitive and natural as claimed, trying out simple coding examples proved as frustrating when things didn’t do what you’d suppose they’d do... (http://www.bitwisemag.com/2/What-s-Wrong-With-Ruby http://www.bitwisemag.com/2/What-s-Wrong-With-Ruby) I actually gave Ruby a shot, going through the interactive tutorial on http://tryruby.hobix.com http://tryruby.hobix.com. I couldn't do it very long, however, because it was completely ridiculous. In what world does it make sense for hash keys to double as string grep? For instance: my_string['foo'] = 'bar' will replace the first instance of foo in my_string with bar?! WHY?! I can stick an exclamation point on the end of method calls... to signify mutation? WHY?! What twisted logic allows one to rationalize multiplying strings like: "5" * 2 == "55" yet throw an exception for: 2 * "5" It makes absolutely no sense! And why would an integer have a method for converting itself to a string? Or an array? I found so many things in Ruby that made me think, "Okay, superficially that's really convenient and sorta cool... but it makes no sense and it is absolutely counter-intuitive. And I feel dirty using it, even if everybody is doing it." Some people, I assume, find Ruby to be "elegant" for the same reasons I find it to be "an abomination."

demallien 17y ago
Well, I can answer at least a few of those 'WHY?!'s. Firstly starting with my_string['foo'] = 'bar', this is a syntax that is used a lot in Ruby for anytime that you wish to recover a subset of a collection - you can use it with a Dir object for example to recover a subset of directories/files, or in the case of a hash, to recover the object stored at the key. The thing is that you need to think about it as being a subset operator, rather than an index operator. The exclamation point at the end of a method name has no syntactic meaning - it is simply a naming convention used by the standard libraries to indicate when the method mutates the object or not. Same same for method names ending with a question mark, it's just a convention to indicate that the response will be a boolean. As for the whole "5" * 2 vs. 2 * "5", I must admit to not understanding where you're coming from. I don't see how you could expect any other kind of behaviour from an object orientated language. Personally I don't like over-riding arithmetic operators for non-number types, for precisely this reason, but hey, some people like it, so why not? Integers converting to strings? I think every language has that no? I mean there's always something like: sprintf(myStringPtr, "%d", myInteger); or cout << myInteger; etc etc By making this a standard method on all classes (to_s), Ruby makes it really easy to dump a class to a serial format, which is very useful for debugging, as an example. I get the impression that you simply didn't spend enough time with Ruby to come to understand its idioms, in which case, you're not really in a position to effectively criticise the language...