I’ve seen that statement multiple times, but in my experience it’s far from the truth. For every thing I ever had to look up in Python I often found more than one way of accomplishing the same task and all of them were (subjectively) uglier and less straightforward than Ruby.
> on "brevity" and "expressiveness", I don't really see them as an attribute that make a language "better". Sure for experienced developers
It’s an attribute including for inexperienced developers. Perhaps especially for them. Even for something as basic¹ as writing a file, one needs multiple lines of code and know about `with` or opening and closing the file². In Ruby: `File.write("/path/to/write.txt", "file contents")`. One line, immediately understandable.
> that doesn't necessarily translate to code that is ideal when working as part of a team, or code that is easy to follow when a new developer starts on an existing codebase.
Agreed. Though in Ruby I have found myself thinking “I wonder if this keyword will work” and it does exactly what I expected. With Python, the norm is frustration with the impossibility of doing the simplest of things like defining a constant.
¹ From the coder’s point of view, never mind the underlying implementation.
² Failing the goal of one and only one obvious way to do something.