From: Jim Weirich <jim@...>
Date: 2005-08-19T19:55:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Python vs Ruby!

On Friday 19 August 2005 04:04 am, Kirk Haines wrote:
> I came to Ruby from many years of Perl zealotry, and one of the things that
> made the switch very, very easy was that when it came to the methods
> available on the core classes, they were generally named the same as the
> keyword to do the same thing in Perl. �So I didn't have to sit in the
> Pickaxe class reference and lookup methods to do most of the common stuff.
> �Most of the time if I just use a method name the same as what the function
> was in Perl, it worked.

Same here.  After using Perl for a number of years I was trying to move to a 
language that would grow into larger programs more gracefully than Perl.  I 
tried to make the switch to Python three times, but found Python just 
different enough that it was hard to use Python for the small, jobs that I 
normally used Perl for.  It was during my third attempt to pick up Python 
that I saw a posting about Ruby by Dave Thomas.  Since I had just finished 
reading the Pragmatic Programmer book, I held Dave's opinion in high regard.  
I downloaded and installed Ruby and was writing Ruby code within a day.  I 
have never used Perl for non-legacy code since the switch.

I'm not sure why switching to Ruby was so much easier than switching to 
Python.  Part of the reason is that I didn't have to keep looking things up 
in Ruby ... things just worked the way I expected.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich    jim@weirichhouse.org     http://onestepback.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, 
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)