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Old 6th February 2010
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Since there are two topics in this poll:
  • Quote:
    Originally Posted by J65nko View Post
    The following response is more indicative of the OpenBSD developers' collective opinion:

    http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=123044348520838&w=2

    Basically, Perl was adopted into base first.
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker
    Anyway, you can copy Python...
    Even if indentation could be preserved in a cut-and-paste operation, rarely is the target at the same indentation level as the original. Additional fussing has to be spent lining everything appropriately to be syntactically correct. Having worked on large Python projects, copying code is not as trivial as it should be.
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TerryP
    I find Ruby better suited for interactive usage (irb), but like wise that Python has considerably better documentation on how to use stuff - that's why I prefer Python.
    What you are seeing is the difference in cultures. Python has been around significantly longer than Ruby, & with Google's embrace of the language, Python's documentation has gotten noticeably better during the last few years. If it wasn't for Rails, Ruby would still be an obscure language coming from Japan.

    Not to digress, but what makes any one language "successful" in the marketplace over another is an interesting study. Ruby is very popular in Japan, but it has not taken on here in the US outside of the Rails phenomena. I have seen it stated that it didn't help that Matz' command of English is minimal, & his first O'Reilly book on Ruby was poorly translated. With the popularity of Rails, a number of solid books penned by a later generation of Ruby enthusiasts have been published, but I don't suspect that Ruby offers enough of a different feature set for it to become a dominant player.

    But I will also take the moment to place devil's advocate. While I too like Python for its lack of syntactic cruft, Ruby is more pure when it comes to being an object-oriented language. Everything is an object. Thus, everything can have related methods applied. This can lead to some very powerful code, & it is not a surprise that Martin Fowler championed Ruby here in the US over a decade ago.

    On the other hand, Python had object extensions tacked onto the language long after its inception, & it shows. I have not studied Python3 enough to have an opinion, but I suspect that providing any level of backward compatibility will hamper Python from becoming as syntactically powerful as Ruby.
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by tetrodozombie
    I hear the Python interpreter is a lot faster than the Ruby interpreter.
    I haven't seen published benchmarks lately, but Ruby offers a lot of its feature set through runtime binding. This has both its good & bad aspects. I also know that the Ruby community is working on making their interpreter more efficient too.
  • Quote:
    Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker
    I tried both Django and Zope, and found them to be rather big and complicated...
    Here, I agree with you. While Django, Zope, TurboGears, etc. all have their followings, none have had the success of Rails. The popularity of libraries & frameworks don't always follow from the popularity of their underlying languages.
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