What's better about Ruby than Python? - comp.lang.python

Erik Max Francis wrote:
> "Brandon J. Van Every" wrote:
>> What's better about Ruby than Python?  I'm sure there's something.
>> What is it?

> Wouldn't it make much more sense to ask Ruby people this, rather than
> Python people?

Might, or might not, depending on one's purposes -- for example, if
one's purposes include a "sociological study" of the Python community,
then putting questions to that community is likely to prove more
revealing of informaiton about it, than putting them elsewhere:-).
Personally, I gladly took the opportunity to follow Dave Thomas'
one-day Ruby tutorial at last OSCON.  Below a thin veneer of syntax
differences, I find Ruby and Python amazingly similar -- if I was
computing the minimum spanning tree among just about any set of
languages, I'm pretty sure Python and Ruby would be the first two
leaves to coalesce into an intermediate node:-).

Sure, I do get weary, in Ruby, of typing the silly "end" at the end
of each block (rather than just unindenting) -- but then I do get
to avoid typing the equally-silly ':' which Python requires at the
_start_ of each block, so that's almost a wash:-).  Other syntax
differences such as '@foo' versus 'self.foo', or the higher significance
of case in Ruby vs Python, are really just about as irrelevant to me.

Others no doubt base their choice of programming languages on just
such issues, and they generate the hottest debates -- but to me that's
just an example of one of Parkinson's Laws in action (the amount on
debate on an issue is inversely proportional to the issue's actual
importance). 


More @ http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/28422d707512283