From: rcoder <rcoder@...>
Date: 2005-12-22T03:47:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Bruce Eckel wouldn't know why to switch from Python to Ruby

Thanks for reminding me -- I have indeed been away from Python since
"way back" in the 2.1 days or so, and while I vaguely recall seeing
discussion of properties, it was after I had moved to Ruby, so it
really didn't jump out and grab me, as the interest was mostly within
the Python community.

Decorators, on the other hand, got a lot of attention in the language
community at large, since they were so comically controversial when
first added to the language.

Regardless, I suspect you'll still find a great deal of code like I
described out there "in the wild," since many non-trivial applications
implemented in Python target several older versions, and the syntax
changes for most of the 2.X updates were non-trivial.

(Mildly OT observation: one of the interesting side-effects of Python's
early adoption by Red Hat was that a single, canonical version of the
runtime was distributed with each release of the OS, and the system
depended on it heavily. This meant that a lot of Python-based
applications had to be written to the oldest Python packaged by Red Hat
for the OS versions they wanted to support, rather than the oldest
release a Python user would be likely to have installed. I suspect that
something similar is already starting in the Ruby world, as Rails has
already caused problems for people trying to upgrade to 1.8.3 and
1.8.4.)

-Lennon