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Comment by ace33 | Hacker News Reader

"I still can't think of a better language for scripting."

Python I find equally if not more simple. Would you agree?

Nope. Can't stand that Python uses built-in functions for basic things like list, map, fold, etc... instead of methods on base classes. Here's a super basic example. Add one to an array [1,2,3] and print results.

Python: print(list(map(lambda x: x + 1, [1,2,3])))

Ruby: print [1,2,3].map {|x| x + 1}

So much more readable, easy to write, etc... Ruby keeps it consistent by making pretty much everything an object and you just call methods. Even Haskell has dot notation to chain functions since it's just so much easier to read and write...

print([x + 1 for x in [1,2,3]])

This really goes to the heart of the problem with modern Python. It's lost the simplicity of the language which was the whole point of it in the first place. OO and functional paradigms were bolted on to varying degrees of success, but an outsider can no longer look at average Python code and understand it at a glance.

List comprehensions were added to Python in version 2.0, which was released 21 years ago. That was about six years after Python 1.0 was released. Are you seriously pining for the simplicity of Python 1.x? (Most of the "outsiders" you're talking about were in elementary school at the time, I don't think they were reading a lot of Python!)

To be fair, you almost never should use the map builtin instead of the pythonic equivalent, list comprehensions.

`print([x + 1 for x in [1, 2, 3])`

I agree that the ruby approach is better in terms of consistency, but most developers will be aware of the conventions python uses.

Ok, that's a nicer result (obviously I don't write Python lol) but still seems inconsistent to me (putting the function before the array) considering Python is an OO language and most people are going to be writing methods for classes where you call methods with dot. I just remember list comprehensions from Coffee-script and not going to lie, I hate them. It's like reading backwards.

Python is a multi-paradigm language, of which OO is one paradigm it supports.

Ruby has map, filter, reduce and a bunch of other functional methods. It's more about the consistency of wondering what's a function versus what's a method and then things like list comprehensions and for loops. Python also doesn't have a lot of the goodies of a real functional language, it encourages for loops and seems to be even more procedural than Ruby but less OO?

Ruby is a strongly OO language, which arguably also has better support for functional programming than Python.

Yes, that's the Zen of Ruby and why I love it.

Not really. Python 3 is all OO under the hood including what appear to be procedural functions. It's just not as elegant as Ruby's OO.

> still seems inconsistent to me (putting the function before the array)

I'm experienced in ruby, and learning python for a project. I don't think I'll ever not wince when using python's ternary;

ruby: size = (waist > 30) ? 'large' : 'small'

python: size = 'large' if (waist > 30) else 'small'

I've always assumed this was to maintain syntactic consistency with comprehensions like [x for x in arr if x > 2].

You're splitting hairs about what the op said. How about len() ?

[1,2,3].__len__()

Yes, Python is all OO under the hood just like Ruby but ugly as sin.

Python, I think, has n number of ways of doing the same thing while Ruby's everything is object approach forces you down a single approach. So while reading ruby code, you usually don't have to shift your mental model from OOP to procedural/list comprehension etc.

If Ruby gets a good machine learning library on par with something like Pytorch, I am sure many folks will shift to it and we might see new DSL emerge.

Which is ironic, given that "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" is in PEP 20.

The vast majority of Python code that I have had to interact with professionally seems to ignore the fact that PEP even exists.

I agree. This has always driven me crazy. Python is supposed to be “there’s one way to do it” but I find it quite inconsistent!

How I wish that was a possibility. Unfortunately Python's dominance of ML and AI is a fait accompli. If anything is going to replace Python in this domain it won't be another scripting language with similar performance.

For me it's annotations. Looked at from a distance, what appears to have happened is that the implementation hit a certain level of complexity before class methods got implemented, and it ended up being easier to do them with "@classmethod" than with "def self.foo", or to fix whatever reason it is that makes "def foo(a,b,c)" not act like a class method if "a" isn't "self".

For me it's crippled lambda and __dunders__.

> Even Haskell has dot notation to chain functions since it's just so much easier to read and write...

Are you referring to function composition?

This is what really put me off Python as somebody who learned Ruby as their first proper (professional 9-5 usage) programming language.

There are other things too, like how print used to be written like a keyword not a function for some reason, and enforced indentation instead of braces or "end" keywords, all just really bugged me. It felt like somebody made YAML Turing complete...

They are surprisingly different.

Ruby has a focus on developer joy and productivity. In some cases this comes to the detriment of language simplicity, and existing features can complicate language evolution.

Surprisingly with this complexity Ruby has had a bit more success with optimized implementations than Python, such as Truffle Ruby.

Ruby is a bit more multi-paradigm than Python IMHO, and has been jokingly called a "language for connecting adults". One can monkey-patch override division to return fractions, with the person maintaining the project deciding if this is a good idea or not. This can potentially make projects with a large number of dependencies harder to debug, which interestingly seems to have created some push-back on importing lots of arbitrary dependencies.

With both Python and Ruby, you wind up having divisions between dependencies because of the poor mismatch between different paradigms - for instance, libraries built to work with Python Twisted or Ruby EventMachine for I/O, or libraries built to work generically or to integrate into say Django on Python's side or Rails on Ruby's side.

Interestingly the communities seem to have different key focus areas - Ruby has historically been very focused on testing (cucumber and selenium for instance) while Python has had a lot of focus on documentation (pydoc and sphinx). Oddly, neither really has had a noticeable literate programming push.

Is "language for connecting adults" an autocorrect of "language for consenting adults"?

Hah yes it was

Equally maybe. Simpler? I'm not sure, I don't know Python very well.

A couple of things I found surprising about Python was having to do the whole `re.compile` thing instead of just `//` in Ruby. Also, no one will ever convince me that a list comprehension is simpler than `map` and related functions. Also, it's hard to beat the convenience of libs that let you do `1.day.ago`.

Ruby gets complicated when people start throwing around metaprogramming where they shouldn't.

I do like Python's file == module. Python seems like it would be a good functional programming language but it goes and only allows for single line lambdas.

Again, I don't know Python very well.

> Ruby gets complicated when people start throwing around metaprogramming where they shouldn't.

This is true. Thankfully it appears that the broader Ruby community has recognized this as well, and has moved away from metaprogramming to a large extent. It's still there, but you don't see it utilized nearly as frequently as you once did.

I'm fine with it for libraries. In fact, its use in libraries is a lot of makes ruby great! It goes too far when people start sprinkling it in business logic making it impossible to find where anything is defined. I'd say you'd either have to go full-lisp and create an entire DSL for your domain (and document it) or keep it completely out of business logic (which, as you say, the community as a whole has pretty much figured this out).

> Python I find equally if not more simple. Would you agree?

Simple, yes. But when I want to write a script as fast as possible with the least amount of effort I don't want simple. I want convenient and powerful. Many things which in Python take multiple lines in Ruby are simple one liners.

There's a certain dichotomy between Ruby and Python that I also see in many other pairs of languages. One language is simple, easy to learn and easy to read (Python), but is not as powerful or convenient to write. The other language is more complex, harder to learn and harder to read (Ruby), but is more powerful and convenient to write.

It seems like most people prefer the first category, which I think is why languages like Python or Go are so popular. There's nothing wrong with that as it's a tradeoff, but I personally prefer the second category, which is the reason why I do all of my scripting in Ruby and not in Python like everybody else.

Simply put I don't really mind the extra complexity since it is essentially mostly a one time cost, so I always pick whichever tool will make me more efficient in the long run. And out of the two (Python and Ruby) that's Ruby. (With a few exceptions like, e.g. machine learning, where you don't really have a choice.)

Really depends on what you mean by "simple". "Simple" is one of those descriptors that gets tossed around a lot in programming by rarely with a clear definition.

Python is a "simpler" language with its preference for "one obvious way", and it does tend to support fewer paradigms than Ruby. Ruby is a more complex language, supporting many approaches. But if you are familiar with the various approaches, that can be "simpler" if it allows you to choose the most fitting approach for whatever problem you have at hand.

To put it another way, "simple" can mean "the language is small/has an obvious way it wants you to do things", or "simple" can mean "the language is flexible enough to be used to model your problem in the most appropriate way". Python is the first kind of simple, Ruby is the second.

IMHO Ruby is much more expressive than Python, and the stdlib is better designed and less crufty. Ruby really has one of the best stdlibs around, I think, and a lot of languages could learn a lot from it - particularly the design of `Enumerable`.

So I prefer Ruby when I have the choice. Part of that is probably just familiarity, but I've been a full time dev on both Ruby & Python projects for long stretches of time so I think I'm in a decent position to compare them. My personal preferences/taste is another aspect, of course, and there's no objective accounting for that.

The case where I often will prefer Python is if I'm scripting something that needs some degree of portability. If you pick a random Linux box it's much more likely to have some version of Python installed than Ruby, so if I'm writing something that should be easy to copy to a box and use without additional setup, I'm more likely to pick Python.

Ruby has the ability to automatically download required gems in single-file scripts via bundler. I don't know of any equally convenient alternative for my python scripts.

e.g. https://gist.github.com/destiny-index/2a2e7e586bb9cd6e5c3000...

Personally I think writing Python is like writing maths, writing Ruby is like writing English.

Depends which one you prefer.

Whether or not it is true, that would certainly explain why I prefer Ruby so strongly over Python.

Having done both professionally, I'll take Python any day of the week. The "Expressivity" lauded by Ruby fans translates into a lack of readability. But the things that drives me crazy is the optional/alternative syntax of ruby.

Ruby is a lot like spoken language in that regard. When the many ways in which to do things are chosen well, Ruby reads like pure poetry. For that I will always enjoy Ruby.

Moreover, the choice of which idiom to use conveys the intent and mindset of the author.

But like any complex language, it's also possible to write very unpoetically, and like any complex language, readability is a function of familiarity with the language's syntax and idioms.

Python forces you to wrestle with its'/Guido's idiosyncracies. It wears them on its sleeve almost like a badge of honor. You may enjoy them, but I don't. Lack of Tail Call Optimization is a huge red mark for me, personally.

Ruby, on the other hand, is literally meant to delight you with its choices/options/expressiveness and I find that it absolutely delivers on that promise.

It's not about simplicity, It's about expressivity.

Python is entirely unreadable to me. Not in the sense that I can't but in the sense that I have to put effort into it in a way I don't have to with Ruby. Part of it is undoubtedly that I'm very picky about syntax and formatting and Python has made a lot of choices that are pretty much the opposite of what I want, but I just can't get used to reading Python code.

Even if you would rate the languages themselves equal to one another. The ecosystem of Python is several orders of magnitude larger. Anything you want to do has a python module or an example. I think the real question is, is it really worth giving up all that for two minor improvements in syntax.

As a Rails dev it's extremely rare for me to need some functionality that Ruby doesn't cover. If you're doing standard web development most likely you're gonna be fine with Ruby. I've been doing this with Ruby for around 8 years so I bumped into quite a few use cases...there are gems for all the standard things.

But yes outside web - data science, web crawlers etc...Python has the clear advantage.

i write python for a living (and have done so for the last five years) but i still find ruby fits my brain better, and it's what i reach for when i want to write a quick script for some personal use.

I am not a Python or a Ruby dev.

The Ruby devs I know are overall great devs

The Python people are second-rate.

Ruby produced tons of good software as a framework base besides Rails.

Python? Eh.

I'm a Python dev. The python devs I know are average on average. I have never met a Ruby dev. But I'm sure I'm first rate!

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