Hacker News Reader

Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

Python and Ruby are quite different when writing code, but have almost the exact same technical abilities and limitations in the grand scheme of things. I've always felt there's little reason to learn both.

View on HN

Ruby is way more capable and expressive than Python. There is so much more you can do with Ruby metaprogramming and don't get me started on Python's feeble lambdas which bear the mark of a BDL imposing his distaste for functional programming. Python is the VHS of programming - widely adopted but technically inferior. Ruby appeals to devs who value elegance of design. Take Sonic Pi (https://sonic-pi.net), for example - I can't imagine sam Aaron producing anything like this in Python. The DSL is everything in this app as with Rails.

Not sure how they compare feature-wise, but take a look at FoxDot:

https://github.com/Qirky/FoxDot

After experiencing Sam Aaron's Overtone - a Clojure REPL for SuperCollider - this does not exactly inspire:

    d1 >> play(P["x( x)  "].palindrome().zip("---[--]").zip(P["  o "].amen()))

Yes exactly, you're not really going to learn anything (syntax aside) by picking up the second, unless you needed it for work reasons or whatever there's surely several other paradigmatically different languages that will be more interesting/instructive to learn.

I'd add elixir to that list too. For the most part, the language differences are not really capitalised on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com