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Developer's Corner / well written article about "Ruby vs Python"
« Last post by housetier on September 13, 2006, 03:24 PM »From this post (thanks Edvard!), I came across this article discussing why its author prefers Python over Ruby by way of DZone.
It is a rather lengthy article and the author tries to not bash Ruby...
...but instead reasons why (s)he prefers Python over Ruby...
The article is well written and well structured, but what impressed me the most was even with many many many comments -- I did not read all of them -- I couldn't see a flame war erupting. This is totally amazing! Now I believe there is still hope for the programmer suffering from "language combatism"...
Yes, I do like the article because "Python wins" and I like Python.
It is a rather lengthy article and the author tries to not bash Ruby...
And all of this excitement and hype is for good reason. Ruby is a simple and beautiful language which is easy to learn yet hard to master. It gives power to the pros without being hard on the newbies. For this reason, it's a great language to pick up. It also has a great mix of imperative and functional qualities, and it has some very nice syntax. Ruby deserves much of the attention it is getting.
...but instead reasons why (s)he prefers Python over Ruby...
...So I took the next step and wrote a simple Python script which would do all the conversion for me, and my Rails app would simply take the uploaded file, have Python convert it to a tab-delmited file, and then Ruby would do the stats conversion.
This actually worked remarkably well, except for one major problem: speed. I tweaked the stats algorithm as much as I could to make it as efficient as possible, but the PHP app that I was converting from was still killing my Rails app by half the time when it came to the stats work. This wasn't going to cut it. Furthermore, I had more complications when as part of the statistical work I wanted to display the name of the current sheet for Excel files. This meant that my Python script wouldn't just be called into, it would also be passing info back out to Rails, and it was getting more and more complicated.
And it was at this point that I pondered why I was even using Ruby and Rails. In my very little usage of Python during this time, I found that it was just as friendly a language as Ruby when it came to syntax. I picked it up very quickly and I didn't have any problems with it. On top of that, it was a good deal faster than Ruby, and had much more library support than Ruby. So why use Ruby over Python? My main incentive had been Rails, but upon doing some research, I discovered that there are multiple extremely solid web frameworks in Python. The big two everyone talks about are Django and TurboGears, but there is also Pylons, web.py, and numerous others. This was not the same situation I met 6 months earlier, when all these Python frameworks either didn't exist or were rather immature. They had grown up to be powerful, well-documented frameworks which stood their own against Rails...
The article is well written and well structured, but what impressed me the most was even with many many many comments -- I did not read all of them -- I couldn't see a flame war erupting. This is totally amazing! Now I believe there is still hope for the programmer suffering from "language combatism"...
Yes, I do like the article because "Python wins" and I like Python.
I just couldn't resist
Too bad they don't link back here; but at least they mention the domain...
