Ruby

[Paul Prescod <address@hidden>]

Michael Vanier wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> You mean, Matz (Ruby's creator) knew about python.  I know; that's why I
> said it was tongue-in-cheek.  I remember Matz posting to comp.lang.python
> when Ruby was still in the experimental stage.  What surprises me is how
> many Ruby aficionados haven't tried python; the two languages are extremely
> similar.  Ruby has more syntax and a more Smalltalky object system, but
> other than that there isn't any compelling difference AFAICT.

There is a lot of truth to that, but I have also met people who said
that they prefer Ruby for one reason or another, after using Python for
some time. The reasons often seem, er, un-compelling to me (disliked
self., disliked __init__, wanted to be able to subclass integers,
indentation). But one reason that I take very seriously is that Ruby is
a much more natural progression from Perl. Python has very little Perl
influence in the core language. Ruby has more.

As some have pointed out, Ruby does have some technical advantages over
Python (continuations, succinct annonymous blocks) but at the same time
there are some technical losses (non-blocking threads, integrated
Unicode, ...) so those are other reasons to choose one or the other.

 Paul Prescod