From: Greg McIntyre Date: 2003-03-22T22:48:20+09:00 Subject: Re: Strong advantages over Python Jim Weirich wrote: > Thanks Paul. Sometimes its easy for those of us who are very familiar > with Ruby to neglect features of a language we are less familiar with. Yes, this was the case. I do not want to propagate misinformation. > It sounds to me as if the original poster is looking for a "slam dunk" > for Ruby (compared to Python), and I'm not sure he's going to find > one. Well, in my defense, it wasn't me who was looking for such a thing. I'm a much more subtle person. ;) My lecterer wanted a "slam dunk" and was perhaps using a straw-man tactic to argue Python's equivalence. What I want are a few benefits Ruby has in practice over Python. Not necessarily technical capabilities (which are usually obscure) but features which are frequently taken advantage of by its programmers where the equivalent Python is not impossible, but significantly more difficult. > Ruby and Python have far more in common than they have > differences. What differences there are more more differences in > preferences than real differences in language power. They are very similar but since researching the differences I've found that there are significant differences in common practice adopted by Ruby and Python programmers. Ruby's learning curve is decidedly easier, for example, due he POLS and its small, powerful and reasonably consistent standard library which owes a lot to Ruby's more pure O-O-ness. Ruby blocks also lend themselves to so many useful things, and are used so extensively in Ruby, I think it's very significant. That is, in terms of what the languages *can* do, they're almost exactly the same. In terms of the nature of the code frequently written in each language, they're quite different. -- Greg McIntyre greg@puyo.cjb.net http://puyo.cjb.net