From: Frank Mitchell <frankm@...>
Date: 2001-10-26T14:51:10+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23400] Re: Ruby and Python: a fuzzy question

Dave Thomas wrote:
> So, here's my question. As Paul Prescod has said, Ruby and Python are
> fairly similar in many significant ways. Despite this, I personally
> have never managed to get excited about Python, but liked Ruby so much
> I wrote a book about it. Other folks have the opposite experience,
> loving Python and not finding much to thrill them about Ruby. Why is
> that? Is it some kind of personality clash between the language and
> the programmer? Is it liking what you're used to? Is it liking or
> disliking the philosophies of the languages' designers? Or is it
> something else?

As someone who's written a fair bit of Python in the not too distant
past, who's written a only little Ruby, and who currently likes Ruby
over Python, I'll take a stab at why I like what I like about each:

1. Python's whitespace reminds me of the pseudocode in Programming 101
texts (using Pascal, ugh).  It's also a really clever solution, and
algorithm, and I like being able to see block structure simply from the
layout of code.  My only problem with it is in practice: deeply nested
conditionals and loops get confusing because there's no explicit "end",
and so you have to mentally line up the code.  (Why do I have deeply
nested control flow? you may well ask, and I can only mumble something
about not having enough time to do it right ...)

2. Ruby has a simple unifying concept: everything's an object.  Python's
is a little more ad hoc: functions vs. types vs. classes vs. modules
.....  (Yes, Python 2.2 will begin doing away with the type/class
distinction, but I cut my teeth on 1.4, and did most of my work in 1.6
or 2.0.)  Similarly, Python has "magic methods" like '__add__' and
'__radd__', while Ruby has the method '+', which you can (re)define on
any class to take care of the '__radd__' case.  I've always liked simple
unifying principles, and can put up with the Perlisms in Ruby simply
because they're syntactic sugar.
 
3. Yes, "syntactic sugar".  I always tend to be aware of what's going on
"under the hood" of any language I work in.  Python almost forces you to
know what's going on: 'self' is an explicit argument, scopes were (until
recently) limited to an easily implementable set, and accessing any
feature on an object or module feels like just a hashtable lookup
(cascading up to one or more Classes).  Ruby has more hidden arguments
and defaults; the ubiquitous "self" I don't mind, but I generally shy
away from Perlish stuff like:

	while gets
		print if /Ruby/
	end

If I had to sum up, Python feels like what you'd give non-programmers or
scripting newbies to do useful programming; Ruby feels like what you'd
give old Perl hands to help them write easily maintainable code, and
programmers who grok OOP to enhance their productivity.  (Check back in
a while though, when I try to write a complex system in Ruby and can
therefore rant against it at length.)

-- 
Frank Mitchell (frankm@bayarea.net)
"What is luck?  Luck is probability taken personally.  Luck is the
excitement of bad math." -- Penn Jillette