[ruby-talk:23076] Re: Bruce Eckel's opinion of Ruby

On Tuesday 23 October 2001 11:20, you wrote:
> Ouch!
>
> http://www.mindview.net/Etc/FAQ.html#Ruby
>
> Thoughts?

Disclaimer: I have written approximately 100,000 lines of Python in the past 
2 years, and approximately 10,000 lines of Ruby in the past 2 months. Thus I 
am approximately 10 times more expert in Python than in Ruby. I don't, 
however, have any particular axe to grind regarding languages, heck, I even 
write my web pages in PHP (one of the most bletcherous excuses for a 
programming language to come down the pike -- but excellent for quicky 
one-off weblets). 

Thoughts:

1. Python's namespace conventions (i.e., no "global" global variables, only 
module-global variables) make it easier to partition a large project amongst 
various programmers, especially projects that require configuration variables 
of some sort (which are "global""), where you can divide them amongst several 
programmers/several modules without worrying about conflicts. 

2. DRB (Distributed Ruby) is *MUCH* simpler and easier than anything that the 
Python folks have devised. The similarity to Java's distributed programming 
model makes it a good prototyping mechanism for distributed Java programs. 

3. I like being able to add methods to an already-existing class in Ruby. 
This makes many things much easier.

4. I like being able to pass around a method in Python. This makes many 
things much easier.

5. Multiple inheritance is good in Python.

6. I like the 'module' concept in Ruby, which works around many of the 
problems with multiple inheritence, but not enough to consider it a full 
replacement for multiple inheritance. 

7. Access to object namespace in Python allows very easy self-referential 
classes. 

8. Ruby extension modules are *MUCH* easier to write than Python ones (and 
I've written a few Python ones in my time). 

9. Reference counting (Python) is more memory-efficient than garbage 
collection (Ruby), since it frees up memory as references are destroyed 
rather than waiting until a garbage collector runs. Python does need a 
garbage collector to collect circularly-referenced objects though, so 
Python's lack of garbage collection overhead has to be offset by the fact 
that circular references currently hang around forever. 

10. Reference counting works hand-in-hand with Python's destructors to handle 
resource cleanups in a real-time manner that's difficult with Ruby (where you 
can set up destructors of a sort but they only run at garbage collection 
time, which may be some time later, in the meantime you still have some open 
files and files on disk hanging around that are not getting cleaned up). 

11. Iterators (Ruby) are good stuff.

12. Python is no speed demon, but is faster than Ruby for the things I do.

13. Python has a nice GUI-based debugger, which makes many things easier. 

14. Ruby has a nice shell-ish/perl-ish 'backtic' syntax which makes many 
things much quicker to write than in Python, which is rather anal and 
European in its treatment of Unix-y stuff. 

15. Python has a much better Emacs mode than Ruby. I especially like the 
class browser. 

Final conclusions: I must agree with Bruce Eckel that I could not recommend 
that a Python programmer move to Ruby except in very special circumstances, 
because the two languages are so similar that there's no real advantage to 
doing so. In my case I'm using Ruby because I needed to prototype a 
distributed application and the various Python frameworks were too complex 
and difficult to use compared to Distributed Ruby. There are also some legal 
reasons stemming from past employment for not using Python in certain 
applications, reasons that I won't discuss here. 

My preliminary conclusion is that Python is a superior language for large 
projects. It is virtually impossible to make a difficult-to-read Python 
program due to its indentation-based syntax, the namespace partitioning makes 
large projects easier to partition amongst multiple programmers or multiple 
programming groups, and there is a large number of enterprise-oriented 
libraries for access to various proprietary and non-proprietary external 
systems. It is also portable to more architectures than Ruby, which is 
important for some large multi-platform applications. Python's syntax is also 
more regular and consistent than Ruby's, which again is important for large 
multi-programmer projects. 

Ruby, on the other hand, is a much better scripting language (as vs. 
general-purpose programming language) than Python. It is much easier to chain 
pieces together, especially for distributed applications. It also makes a 
superior language for prototyping Java applications, since many aspects 
(iterators, rinda, single inheritance only, etc.) are similar to Java. I 
would not, however, relish attempting to manage 100K+ lines of Ruby code for 
a project, while Python proved to be quite usable for 100K+ lines of code. 

-- 
Eric Lee Green          GnuPG public key at http://badtux.org/eric/eric.gpg
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             You do not save freedom by destroying freedom