From: Ben Giddings Date: 2003-08-24T07:18:32+09:00 Subject: Re: [PYTHON] YAPVRA (Yet Another Python vs. Ruby Article) On Saturday, August 23, 2003, at 02:04 PM, james_b wrote: > Interesting blog post from a Pythonista on "Linguistic Simplicity," > and why Ruby fails to pass muster. Python users are always harping on how in Python code looks the same, no matter who writes it, because a fundamental design decision for Python is that there should only be one way of doing something. But that simply isn't true, even with the most basic of features, "import" >>> import fibo >>> fibo.fib(1000) 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 >>> from fibo import fib >>> fib(500) 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 >>> import fibo as foobar >>> foobar.fib(1000) 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 >>> from fibo import fib as bif >>> bif(200) 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 As for the rest of his entry, it's mostly flamebait. Perhaps unintentional, but he misrepresents certain aspects of Ruby. He prefers the syntax of Python to that of Ruby. Fine. He doesn't get that conditional expressions could be designed to return values. Fine. My reasons for disliking Python are mostly personal too. I happen not to like too many underscores. I dislike explicitly passing "self" to methods in a supposedly object-oriented language. (Incidentally, the same thing I dislike about Perl's OO syntax, and Ruby is supposed to be the one that's more Perl-like). The most common complaint I've heard about Ruby from Python people is that there's more than one way of doing something, and there are strange shortcuts and Perl like special variables around. There's something they don't seem to realize (and what you wouldn't realize unless you spent some time with Ruby). Although there's more than one way to do things, there's the path of least resistance, and everybody seems to follow it. Sure, $_ exists, but nobody seems to use it, because the places it is mostly used in Perl are done with iterators in Ruby. What's funny is that from his page he links to a post he made in comp.lang.python about his experiences with Ruby, and that post was made in response to a post by "Brandon J. Van Every", asking "What's ***TOTALLY COMPELLING*** about Ruby over Python?" Ben