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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

Python is arguably more "obviously readable", in a sense that when you see some construct, and you don't know what it is, but you have a guess, that guess is usually correct. It makes the grammar more verbose than Ruby in many ways, and idiomatic Python is almost always more verbose than idiomatic Ruby, but for many people, ease of reading and understanding is preferable.

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Care to elaborate with an example? I use Python day-to-day and did quite a bit of Ruby a few years ago, but I fail to see significant differences in verbosity.

What I do see is that Python is somewhat less consistent and readable (list comprehensions beyond the simplest ones are unreadable, Ruby's blocks allow cleaner DSLs, len(a) vs a.size, little things like "3.times", allowing "?" and "!" in identifiers). But Python has a bigger and more diverse ecosystem. So although I would prefer Ruby over Python, the ecosystem aspect makes the point moot.

Ruby is more concise whenever you have a need for case statements or regex.

Really wish Ruby had won this war. It's much more pleasant to use.

It can not win when there are only three people working on it part timely. Check the new feature list of Python release every few months.

It boils down to an issue of funding ?

I cant , and could never understand why this is, and if it is a problem.

Github, Basecamp, Twitch, Stripe, Square, AirBnB, Shopifly, Cookpad, and many more. All these are very successful site that are using Ruby ( Not necessarily Rails ) and most of them profitable.

If each or them could fund a 20-33% Salary of an additional Core Dev you instantly have 3 - 4 people working on it Full time.

So I have been thinking on this for sometime, It is because the Ruby community and the world as a whole does not want to donate? Or are we lacking someone to push this and ask for some help when needed?

> If each or them could fund a 20-33% Salary of an additional Core Dev you instantly have 3 - 4 people working on it Full time.

I came to say the same thing.

Its such an obviously good idea. It seems all that is needed is a champion for this cause.

Especially interesting when you compare to Python, which is used extensively by Google, Dropbox, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Youtube.

Of those I know both Dropbox and Google have employed Gudio Von Rossum, and various other Python core devs are also employed full time.

Overall it seems that Python is much more community driven than Ruby. Python is interesting in that it has several big camps, including web dev, systems programming/automation, scientific usage, machine learning, etc, and all of these communities are fairly self sufficient but also contribute back to the main language.

Well that's exactly what is happening these companies employ people who work more or less full time on Ruby core issues. A lot of Ruby features are funded by big corps. The 3 people are just the 'core' core team. Like Linus did for Linux for years

It's one small thing but string interpolation annoys the crap out of me when using Python and while it might tick the understandable check box I wouldn't say it's easier to read. After using Ruby it's such a chore to read or write in my opinion (which admittedly doesn't mean much having so little experience with Python).

How is "#{fname} #{surname}" better than f'{fname} {surname}' ?

By the glare of it, none. But you have to understand that ruby has that `#{}` since ways before, and python has just added that `f` syntax recently. Also in ruby it's the only way of doing string interpolation, while in python you have % and other methods.

Ruby does have % too for quite a while. As in

    '%s won $%i' % ['herbst', 5000]

You actually want both of these. The reason why explicitly indexed placeholder syntax is still important, even if you have interpolation, is because the order in which the arguments are referenced may change when the string is localized.

OTOH, f-strings were added to Python not long ago, and they are the third or fourth (depending on if you count `string.Template`) syntax for string interpolation in Python. Frankly, string formatting in Python is a bit of a mess right now.

I dunno man, I don't think the languages are properly comparable for readability.

  5.times do

    print "s"  

  end

It's a double-edged sword. The code's behavior is apparent in that simple example, but things get considerably more difficult to understand when you're dealing with monkey patched methods and dangerously clever method_missing magic in non standard library code.

Yeah, I had to deal with a perl port from a ruby library that had kept most the rubyisms in. The really disturbing thing about it was the Frankenstein levels of autovivification involved. Fortunately someone (not me) is going to get paid deal with that soon.

You can certainly find snippets that are simpler in Ruby than in Python; they're just not the majority. Consider a slightly more complicated case where you need to print out items in a range with some modification. Idiomatic Ruby:

   (0 ... 5).each do |x|
     print (x + 1)
   end

Idiomatic Python:

   for x in range(0, 5):
     print (x + 1)

To understand Ruby, you need to know what || does, and the overall sequencing of the words as you read that construct is somewhat unnatural for English. Python is comparatively easier to parse with no prior background.

It is definitely possible to write Ruby in a way that's still highly readable. But from what I've seen of real world Ruby code, that's not the way it tends to be written - idiomatic Ruby values expressiveness and DRY, so you see blocks and various terse syntactic sugar used all over the place; lots of "clever" code in general. There's nothing wrong with that - I generally prefer expressiveness over readability myself - but many people do not.

I see your point. But I'll take the liberty to use part of your comment as my own response: "You can certainly find snippets that are simpler in Ruby than in Python, and vice-versa". Now that is something I 100% agree with (I added the part after the comma btw).

Basically what I'm saying is that the differences are very minor compared to differences vs, for example, other languages (Java, Scala, C++, etc). So from that perspective there's not much to complain about. I just have a slight bias towards Ruby, I find it a little more readable (in a small way).

While it is true that with ruby you have to know more syntax, without previous knowledge of either language you caught on pretty fast.

To me it is more expressive of my intent to say "0 to 5, for each, do something" than "for something in the 0 to 5 range do something"

Also you happened upon what peeves me most about Python, you are not actually looping from 0 to 5 since range is inclusive at the start, but exclusive at the end. So while (0..5) gives you 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, range(0,5) will get you just 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. Of course it's easier if you think that range() is rather "I want to take X steps", so if you just want to step 5 times range(5) does exactly what you need it to do.

I think this is mostly to keep in line with indexing, where you have that same sort of semi-inclusion.

'example string'[3:8] # gives you 5 characters.

But wouldn't you rather just say: "hey, starting from the 3rd index, give me 5 letters" like

    2.3.3 :001 > 'example string'[3, 5]
     => "mple "

Instead of having to think before hand what indexes thous would be.

It depends on what you're trying to do. It's pretty common with strings to ask for "everything excluding the first and the last character", for example, and then you want the end index (counted backwards), not length. Another common case is when you looked up a substring and got an index, and now you're slicing the string around that index.

But there are also many cases where length is more desirable.

Ditto with ranges - both end-inclusive and end-exclusive ranges are useful in different cases. I kinda like the fact that Ruby lets you choose, but I think that .. vs ... syntax distinction is too subtle and likely to cause bugs.

I kinda like the way Nim does it: .. for inclusive, and ..< for exclusive - e.g. 1..<10. They also use special syntax for count-from-end, instead of negative indices, which is also a good thing IMO (the decision to index from start or from end is usually something that's not going to change at runtime; but with negative indexing, it might inadvertently do so if you underflow when computing the index).

  1.upto(5) do |x|
    puts x
  end

is pretty idiomatic. So I don't see your point.

Or:

   print("s\n" * 5)

Which is more concise and valid in both.

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