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Yes - Ruby makes it easy.

I'm run into the downside, though, that Ruby isn't optimized for immutable operations - tons of object instances created. I've needed to 'pythonize' my Ruby code in the worst cases - using mutable functions to dramatically reduce memory usage.

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Can you say more about this Pythonisation process? How is Python any better at immutable operations? Ruby and Python are both OO languages which can be used in a procedural style. Hell, you can write a whole app in Ruby without creating a single class if you so choose.

I think what they mean by 'pythonize' is ditching fluent functional style and embracing dumb imperative mutability for the sake of efficiency. Rewriting sequence compositions as stateful for-loops. Idiomatic Python is more pragmatic than Ruby in that regard, stupid=good (yet ironically Ruby's strings are mutable and Python's aren't :p).

IMO, Python is worse at immutable operations. Ruby makes it easy (but inefficient). Python makes mutable code the easy path.

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