Do I not like Ruby anymore? 2024/05/28
I recently started working at a Python shop. The reasons behind this choice of employment are very much unrelated to the technology stack. Python is not my favorite programming language. In fact, allow me to drop the euphemism and express my pure, unadulterated thoughts about it: I never liked Python, I see it as a huge red flag and I think the world would be a better place if we all decided to finally move on from it. With that out of the way, let’s talk about how I’ve recently started to come around to Python and actually kind of like it in some aspects?
I (used to) love Ruby
Ruby was my first love as a programmer. It is a playful, concise, elegant, expressive language that is built out of a handful of simple concepts with a good serving of syntax sugar on top.
There’s no distinction between objects and primitives; everything is actually an object, even nil !
! You can reimplement if using blocks and two additional methods on NilClass and FalseClass if you want!
using blocks and two additional methods on and if you want! Method calls are just syntax sugar for send ing messages to objects!
ing messages to objects! You can define new methods on an object at call time using method_missing !
Ruby was clearly designed taking inspiration from such language designer’s languages as Smalltalk and Lisp, and as a budding Schemer with an interest in programming language design, that inspired me a lot. Now, Python and Ruby were the two most popular “scripting” languages at the time. Ruby exploded thanks to Rails, and Python saw a lot of success as a language for data science and a better choice than Perl for command line tools and scripts. The two languages were often compared and contrasted, and of course I, as a fan of Ruby, had a lot of opinions about Python.
Python as a worse Ruby (and an even worse Scheme)
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