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Comment by abolibibelot | Hacker News Reader

An interesting retrospective. What would be interesting would be to know the challenges you've encountered once you started working as a developer. I have two questions though: I'm curious to know why you state that

"Ruby is probably the best platform to learn if you're a designer and you want to learn how to code to add value for your clients."

and also I'd love some more details on why "Python is fairly mediocre in a lot of ways" (not starting a language war here, I'm genuinely curious)

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In terms of Ruby, I'm saying that partly because of the omekase-nature of Rails, and also partly because Ruby doesn't have the same level of libraries for some of the tasks I mentioned. It seems like for all intents and purposes, the possibility space in terms of what you would want to use Ruby for is smaller, with the sweet spot being CRUD sites.

In terms of the downsides of Python: speed, lack of tail recursion and real threading, many libraries outdated, lack of some features of other modern languages, etc.

What does that even mean? I highly doubt that any form of Ruby is faster than WSGI PyPy.

In terms of threading, Ruby and Python are in the same, sad, GIL boat. The speed issue is the same, but the C libraries alleviate this somewhat (Numpy, scikit-learn and lxml come to mind). Tail recursion is really needed when you have a functional language, and since Guido van Rossum, and therefore Python, has a bias against FP, the lack of TCO is not that glaring when you write pythonic code (which is kind of a circular argument, I know). When it comes to libraries, the old "batteries included" argument gets old, and the standard library shows its age, but it's usually addressed in external libraries... ...which brings me to my real gripe about Python, the ever changing way you're supposed to manage packages (use easy_install, wait, no use pip and virtualenv, wait you should take a look at wheels too, and so on).

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