From: Scott Gonyea <scott@...>
Date: 2010-11-25T06:55:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's "More than one way to do things."

On Nov 24, 2010, at 1:31 PM, Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@ruby-lang.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> In message "Re: Ruby's "More than one way to do things.""
>    on Thu, 25 Nov 2010 06:16:16 +0900, Jason Lillywhite <jason.lillywhite@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> |There is one point made about Python vs. Ruby on this site:
> |http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRuby that interests me:
> |
> |It is this:
> |Ruby: "There is more than one way to do it."
> |Python: "There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to
> |do it."
> |
> |Do you agree that Ruby emphasizes having more than one way to do it more
> |than Python does? Do you believe this is a good thing for Ruby? Why?
> 
> "There is more than one way to do it" is the slogan we borrowed from
> the Perl community.  I cannot speak for the Perl community, but for
> us, the slogan expresses the importance of diversity.  But we do not
> love diversity for no reason.  We do not want confusion, for the sake
> of diversity.  So to rephrase: "There should be more than one way to
> do it, if having many way is rational, depending on often untold
> context".
> 
>                            matz.
> 

I couldn't agree more. There is no island of simplicity. Ruby is a pragmatic language and wants to be exploited—not shoe-horned.