Comments on: Can’t find the Ruby Kool-aid

By: Robin

Robin — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:51:56 +0000

Class variables are a design wart in Ruby, they have strange behaviour. As for $_, I have never used it once in my code. For the regular expression things, there are OO alternatives, like “string”.match(/i/) (instead of =~) which returns a MatchData object (or nil if it didn’t match).

You don’t have to use braces in Ruby, use do … end. Well, hashes use braces too, but that’s the same as in Python.

By: m0j0

m0j0 — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:42:47 +0000

Interesting to hear, Robin – the book I’m reading makes pretty good use of $_, in addition to the others you mention, as well as @@ for (iirc) class variables, and it also mentions that you have to use [] for arrays in some instances, which seemed odd (why *sometimes*?), and this is in addition to perl-isms like =~

It’s not a matter of not being able to cope, mind you. It’s just that the lack of this stuff – which is to say, the explicitness of Python is what I found most refreshing when I made the move.

Well, that and a distinct lack of braces. I have a bad schizophrenia with braces. I use allman-style braces, which means a brace gets it’s own line. It’s the only way my brain can parse scope. But I *hate* wasting all of that space! So I’d come up with crafty one liners to reformat my braces. I guess I’m in the minority, but I found the significance of whitespace in Python to be a big win ;-P

By: rgz

rgz — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:11:35 +0000

There is what I call the Python-Ruby paradox. It is said that in order to choose between Python or Ruby you must learn both but this beats the greatest advantage of Python the speed of learning. With Python you can get productive from day one thanks to the many thing you DON’T have to learn in order to use the language.

By: Robin

Robin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:24:01 +0000

What symbols are you talking about? Perl requires much much more usage of symbols than Ruby. The only ones you’ll use most of the time are @instance_variable and |block_var|. Things like $_ are deprecated and their usage is frowned upon.

I know and use both Python and Ruby and find them equally beautiful. What I like more about Ruby is its OO system (only message sends, no distinction between attributes and methods) and blocks. In Python I like the explicitness, the one way to do it, its syntax (named arguments, etc.) and functional properties (constructors are functions, yay).

What I don’t like about Ruby is the Perl heritage and about Python its inconsistencies in naming functions (assertEquals), but that’s hopefully going to be better in Python 3 and with more widespread adoption of PEP 8.

By: Rick Harding

Rick Harding — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 04:32:11 +0000

I looked at ruby a while ago and I came to the same conclusion with regards to the symbols. I’m just not a fan of that. I’ve never been a perl guru/fan so that made it all the worse for me. Python just seems to make a ton of sense, especially for sysadmin stuff.