From: "Stephan Kämper" <Stephan.Kaemper@...>
Date: 2001-10-26T19:51:45+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23421] 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,

And I like Programming Ruby, both the activity and reading the book. :)

> 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?

What I think is that it's pretty much the personal (taste|style|philosophy)
that makes me like a language (or not).
Compared to that it's less (now and then much less) importent whether XY can
be done easily or not.
It 'feels right'. It's like finding the right tool after looking for it for
a long time.
It's kind of emotional somehow. I guess that's why all those discussions
much too often turn out to be emotional.

Among other things:
Ruby is a joung language, it has recent (oo) ideas incorporated - more than
other languages than I know of/are used at my place
I got to speed faster than in most other languages I tried.
The community (that is all _you_ otu there) is a great one.
Most things I try work as I expect. (After being haflway through "Mastering
Regular Expressions" that holds treu for regexes, too)
It's supported well on Lin and 'reaosnably well' for Win (Thanks for the Win
installer Kit Dave & Andy!)


> I have some very vague idea of what it might be (at least as far as
> I'm concerned), but I'd like to see what people think before posting
> it.

I'd like to see what your reasons are, and those of the others...


> 
> Cheers
> 
> Dave


Cheers,

Stephan