Ruby and Python
Apr 27th, 2006 by Phil Dawes
I’ve been playing with Ruby a bit recently. The big question: is the language better than python ? For me it comes down to a punchup between 2 killer features: Ruby’s blocks vs Python’s whitespace-indent magic.
Ruby’s smalltalk style blocks are great - they neatly support looping, closures and resource management idioms in one simple powerful construct. Much better than the 3 or 4 python alternatives required to support them (for, with, def etc..).
On the other hand, Ruby’s superflous ‘end’ statements everywhere make me balk. As Tim Bray mentioned on a recent podcast: Python is just right about the whitespace thing. The problem is that I’ve been spoilt by python’s killer indents-seperate-blocks for too long to want to go back now.
Will I convert in the end? Hmm… dunno.
The following link is relevant to this i think:
http://mjtsai.com/blog/2002/11/25/perl_vs_python_vs_ruby/
But personally, after 15 years or so of perl i’ve migrated to Ruby and i have to say, i am enjoying it.
Perl was fun but got a bit hairy at times.
Ruby is much more well thought out (OO), clean and has some fantastic features like continuations. I also like the fact that it was relatively easy to migrate from Perl. To top it off, the Rails framework adds more fun factor.