From: Ville Vainio <ville@...>
Date: 2004-04-03T17:14:22+09:00
Subject: Re: deciding between ruby and python

>>>>> "Atrdridel" == Aredridel  <aredridel@nbtsc.org> writes:

    >> Calling to_s() seems kinda brutal from the Python POV. Perhaps this is

    Atrdridel> And it certainly is convenient:

....

    Atrdridel> Then with an array of Sockets, you can do:

    Atrdridel> [......].join("\n")

    Atrdridel> src: 10.10.0.0 dest: 10.10.0.1
    Atrdridel> src: 10.10.0.0 dest: 10.10.0.2

    Atrdridel> Useful?

Indeed it is. We do the same thing in Python (just define __str__() in
your classes), but with the added spice of "explicit is better than
implicit". So you need to coerce thems to strings before you join
them:

list_as_strings = [str(e) for e in list_of_objects]

I consider this a feature, because it leads to more robust code and
less surprises. If I expected to have a list of strings, but one
element is a socket, I should know about it.

'Explicit is better than implicit' comes from "Zen of Python", if
someone didn't know. Those who didn't, check out:

http://www.python.org/doc/Humor.html#zen

    Atrdridel> The tradition of duck-typing and various kinds of
    Atrdridel> hammer to coerce objects into acting like the
    Atrdridel> appropriate types is an appealing part of Ruby.

The duck part applies to Python too (even though we usually speak of
dynamic typing ;-). The implicit coercion is going to burn you on
large projects ("Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly
silenced."), though. Perhaps this is indicative of the more general
Ruby tradition (taking influence of perl?) of optimizing shorter
scripts at the cost of large scale development?

-- 
Ville Vainio   http://tinyurl.com/2prnb