From: gandy@... (Thomas Gandy)
Date: 2002-01-13T04:26:39+09:00
Subject: Why I think Ruby will eventually be more popular than Python

Ruby and Python both play in the same niche: they're both Object
Oriented scripting languages. As such, it can be argued that they both
draw from the same pool of programmers.  However, I would argue that
they really don't: The styles and philosophies of the two languages
appeal to different sets of programmers.

Why do I think that Ruby will ultimately prove more popular?  To
answer that question, I'd like to make an analogy to the situation in
the early '80's between C and Pascal.  (In this analogy 'C' represents
Ruby and Pascal represents Python).  Pascal was somewhat popular in
the PC world of the early '80's.  It was touted by the 'puritan'
Computer Science crowd as being more 'pure' than C.  These folks
considered C to be a bit too freewheeling for their pure tastes.  C
allowed you to do too many dangerous, unreadable things.  But which
language ultimately became more popular?  C did as we all know now. 
Why?  Because with all of Pascal's 'purity' came restrictions.  There
were a lot of things you could do in C that just couldn't be done in
Pascal.  Some of these things were 'questionable' (at least in the
minds of the puritans), but they were doable.

Ultimatly, the 'flexible' mentality won over the 'puritan' mentality
because in C you had more freedom.

Now fast forward to the present...  I see a lot of the same 'puritan'
attitude in the Python camp as was in the Pascal camp back then.

Not to say that Ruby is a messy hacker language - it's really quite
clean and concise, very similar to Python really.  But Ruby allows you
to do things like change the behavior of built-in types if you like,
for example.  Ruby is just more flexible and history shows that
flexibility ultimately wins over purity.

just my 2cents worth.
--gandy