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Comment by jtdowney | Hacker News Reader

"Java and PHP have been around long before Ruby."

It seems like they are confusing Ruby and Rails in the first point. PHP, Java, and Ruby were all first publicly released in 1995.

From their respective Wikipedia articles:

"Lerdorf released PHP/FI as "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0" publicly on June 8, 1995"

"Sun Microsystems released the first public implementation as Java 1.0 in 1995."

"The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domestic newsgroups on December 21, 1995."

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That's reinforced by point #6 ("Ruby is too opiniated"). Ruby is not particularly opiniated and the community seemed to have much less attachment to doing things the idiomatic way than Python folks.

Why this attack on "Python folks" when the comment you replied to never mentioned Python? Got a bee on your bonnet?

Yow! Someone's a bit touchy. He was comparing Ruby with Python, which is probably valid.

The whole "opinionated" thing is a bit silly really. Ruby isn't all that opinionated, as the GP poster says. Why Python people would get their bee in a bonnet over "opinionated" code is somewhat beyond me. After all, Python is a language where whitespace is significant...

Python is by design a one way to do things language whereas Perl is There is more than one way to do things.

'There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.' from http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ a sentiment that is re-enforced by the python community and even used to pitch python as an easier language since there is only one (right) way.

It's funny you interpret that as an attack. What do you perceive as hostile in my post? It's just part of the Python philosophy. Whether you consider this a good or a bad thing is up to you. Personally, I consider it an advantage, though I used to think different.

It is true the blog post does not mention Python. However, if you should pick one "opiniated" language in the same niche as Ruby, this is the one most people would pick.

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