From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2004-10-21T08:55:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Python vs. Ruby (Re: A concise description of Ruby?)


On Oct 20, 2004, at 7:42 PM, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

> * gabriele renzi <rff_rff@remove-yahoo.it> [Oct 21, 2004 00:40]:
>> - TIMTOWTDI is a wrong concept
>
> That's why Ruby isn't Perl.  I can't really tell what you are getting 
> at
> with this point.

This does seem to come up a lot in Python vs. Ruby comparisons. I think 
Python people like the idea that the language enforces a lot of ways of 
thinking for you: the whitespace issue is part of this. I like Ruby 
because you can enter the language whichever way you want: quick 
script-hack language, deep OO universe language, somewhere in between.

TIMTOWTDI gets a bad rap 'cause it's so closely associated with Perl. 
The problem with Perl isn't that you can do something in more than one 
way; the problem is that at a certain scale, the most elegant way to 
solve a problem requires you to remember 7 arbitrary lines of 
unbelievably arcane syntax. (OO in Perl tends to be a heavyweight 
endeavor, for example, whereas most of the Rubyists I know are 
constantly extracting new classes without giving it a second thought.)

In short, I'd respond with "Perl gave TIMTOWTDI a bad rap. Ruby is 
TIMTOWTDI done right."

F.