From: Ryan Paul <segphault@...>
Date: 2004-05-11T16:28:54+09:00
Subject: Re: in search of a compelling reason to use ruby....

On Tue, 11 May 2004 12:50:24 +0900, James Britt wrote:

> Ryan Paul wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> I just wanted to thank everybody for the great responses. 
> 
> You're welcome.
> 
> I have a favor to ask.  I'm guessing that most people on this list know 
> Ruby far better than they do Python.  The Ruby/Python comparison is a 
> recurring theme, and we try to collect  resources (such as the Ruby Eye 
> For The Python Guy page) so folks don't get callouses retyping the same 
> info.  You being a Pythonista and all, I'd appreciate any comparisons 
> you can offer, or critiques of existing comparisons.  There's little 
> point in referring people to resources that misrepresent Python, or put 
> up straw man arguments.
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 
> James Britt

I've been taking a lot of notes while learning ruby, comparing the ruby
examples to python equivalents, and recording how both ruby and
python solve certain problems. I think I could probably clean up my notes
a bit, and restructure them into a relatively good comparison between the
languages. When I fill it out a bit more, i'll make it publicly available,
and drop a link here and in comp.lang.python (where I will probably be
lynched for my impertinence). So far, most of the criticisms of ruby that
flourish in the python community are based on misconceptions. (for
instance, a lot of people seem to know that ruby only supports single
inheritance, but what they dont know is that the mixin system MORE than
makes up for it)

I also want to write parts of it like a cookbook so that python
programmers can see how ruby handles some of the specific things that are
commonly done with python. The idea of 'switching languages' is really
unnerving for a lot of programmers, and I think its really important to
illustrate just how minimal the learning curve is. Ruby feels almost like
a logical extension of python, with some pleasant perl tricks thrown in
for good measure.

Presentation is always an issue, and i'm still deciding what the best way
to express the information would be. If I started a conversation with a
python programmer saying something like "have you ever tried ruby? it does
some neat things!" they would probably scoff, but if I said "what if you
could do assignments in anonymous functions?" I might capture their
interest.

There is a growing community of python malcontents that might be
interested in ruby. They have a lot of really creative syntax ideas, most
of which are ignored by the mainstream python community. I think it would
be of benefit to the ruby community to be aware of some of their interests
and motivations. Some of those programmers might be interested in
contributing to ruby, rather than working on their own independent
python forks, if I can illustrate ways in which ruby meets their
individual needs. To that end, I will probably spend some time looking at
python derivatives to see where the divergences are, and how (if at all)
their python extensions compare to some of ruby's development idioms.
'Prothon' is a good example of a python derivative on my list. I also mean
to show how ruby provides native support for many of the features hacked
into python by Xoltar's partial, functional, and datastruct libraries.

Ultimately, i'm interested in a flexible and powerful interpreted
language, and what I have seen of ruby's style indicates a progressive and
intuitive development paradigm that is bold enough to cast aside standards
and cliches to return the power to the user.

--segphault