GP is trolling. No need to counter-troll while feeding. The flamebait on committing to Ruby does not invalidate his point on stdlib maintenance though.

We can sit here and ping each other with examples of cruft all day. I think it can be shown objectively that Python's standard library is better maintained. I'll attempt to below.

I'm not saying this has a great significance in picking one language over the other in and of itself. Just that if you want to talk specifically about stdlibs, the differences are pretty clear-cut imo.

== In terms of quantity of updates ==

- Mar 13 2007: Ruby 1.8.6 launched

- May 18 2008: Ruby 1.8.7 launched

- Distance: ~14 months

- Sep 19 2006 Python 2.5 launched

- Oct 18 2008 Python 2.6 launched

- Distance: ~23 months

So discount the amount of 2.5->2.6 changes accordingly to account for the extra time.

Then compare stdlib changes:

- Ruby: http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/tags/v1_8_7/NEWS

- Python: http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html#new-and-improved-mo... or http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6.1/NEWS.txt

== In terms of quality of documentation ==

Compare

http://www.rubydoc.info/docs/ruby-stdlib to http://docs.python.org/library/

You'd need to compare across actual libraries (unittest vs Test/Unit etc). I didn't provide specific examples in links to avoid inevitable accusations of cherry-picking.

== In terms of process ==

Compare http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3108/ to... closest equivalent I could find was http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/projects/roadmap/ruby-19 . Anyone with a better link?