[ruby-talk:12085] Re: Not Ruby, for me, for the moment at least

From: "Colin Sampaleanu" <[e-mail]>

> Speaking from my own perspective, I wouldn't underestimate how big how
much
> impact the (pretty much richer) library of code (internal and external)
that
> Python has available to it would have in making people choose Python over
> Ruby. I have used Python here and there over the last year, preferring it
to
> Perl since Perl always felt like a big mess to me, and Python felt
cleaner.
> On the other hand, Python's roots are pretty evident, and I was never
> completely happy with it. When I first took a serious look at Ruby about a
> week ago, it just felt 'right' (I might even say beautiful). I will try to
> use it where I can, and try to contribute as much code as I can, but I
have
> a feeling I will still be using Python for many things. My primary use of
a
> scripting language is to save time. If I need to get something going, and
I
> can find Python code that helps me get most of the way there, but have to
> implement similar code in Ruby, most of the time it will be a no-brainer
due
> to time constraints. Things like nice IDEs (along with PythonWin there are
> new Python IDEs from PythonWare and theKompany) also have an impact on
> productivity, so for me at least, are a factor.

Not sure if newbie experiences mean anything to regular readers of this list
or not,
but I'll share mine just in case.  Like Colin, I felt Perl too big a mess to
spend time
trying to master.  (I am a longtime C++ programmer, but more on the Windows
side.)  Python was a welcome relief, but I found myself disliking some
aspects, most
notably string immutability, and the need for self all over the place.

I was really excited when Dave and Andy published their book, and the timing
was
great, as my team was recently tasked with a job perfect for a scripting
language.
The area we are working in is SNMP, so I downloaded the Ruby SNMP module,
but could never get it to work, either in Linux, on Windows with Cygwin, or
on
Windows using VC++.  I read the chapter on extending Ruby, but it was too
much
work to write an extension to use a standard SNMP API, such as the UCD-SNMP
project.  After spending about 6 days, I decided to see what Python offered.

Ofter the first day of programming, I had a simple program that did SNMP
gets on
all 400 variables in our private MIB, and wrote the MIB variable name and
current
value to a file.  We are using something approaching XP, and so will add
functionality
incrementally.  Eventually we want the ability to read all variables from
one device,
and set each device at a site with most of the settings from this one
device, and provide
this ability via a browser.

A fun little project, and one I would have loved to learned Ruby with.  But,
it was just
much faster getting started with Python.  I will continue to look to Ruby
for each
project I have, so hopefully I will get to use it soon.

Richard