Which should I learn - Python or Ruby?

67 responses total.

Why not both?  Either is sufficiently intuitive that one can be usably
proficient in a day or two; picking up both should not be that hard.

Personally, from a pure language-design perspective, I prefer Ruby over
Python.  Steve Yegge, however, feels that it is not an acceptable substitute
for LISP and gives a number of reasons why:
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptable-lisp.html

Python feels a bit rougher around the edges, but is still useful.

Remmers, with all do respect, isn't it rogaine and viagra time for you?

I've never dealt with ruby and spent maybe 2 hours with python. Maybe I wasn't
fully understanding python, but from what I could tell, python names it's
chunk of memory. Here is how I understood it. In C, I would go like

char i = 6;
char *p = &i;

in C, &i is just a chunk of unamed memory. The only thing that has a name is
the shit associated with the variable i.

However in python this would be a reference (ie not a pointer) and this
reference would have a name. This means I can do true variable rebinding as
opposed to simulatng variable rebinding in C.

It is true that, in python, variables are references.

To me, Python feels a bit more hacked together; you can tell that some things
were bolted onto the side of the language, often rather clumsily.  Ruby is
much cleaner in this respect.

I find some of the syntax of ruby very elegant. Never did any serious
coding with python to really compare. But really like ruby.

Re #1:  I'm sure you're correct that it's not difficult to pick up the
basics of both languages, so let me clarify the question a bit.

Do folks have a preference for one over the other as an environment for
developing web applications?  Or some third language?  PhP (with which
I've had a bit of experience) is another candidate to throw into the mix.

I prefer to write my web applications in PHP, and do any back-end
scripting using Perl.

Regarding #6; Ah, that's a little clearer.  Ruby, hands down.  Rails is the
`killer app' for web type stuff.

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about Rails, most of it favorable,
although apparently there are scalability issues (Twitter is written in
Rails and has run into some problems).

Yeah, I've done some PHP development - my jremmers.org website is all
PHP-based, currently.  What would be the advantages of Ruby+Rails over
PHP, or PHP+Perl?

(I've retitled this item to better reflect its purpose.)

Regarding #9; The usual: A better underlying language, a huge amount of 3rd
party support, and some others: Rails has a good implementation of model 2
for web applications, which is really nice to work with.  It makes developing
really fast; and hopefully, a lot of of the scalability issues will be
resolved with future upgrades to the Ruby interpreter.  But how big do you
expect your demands to be?  Do you really expect to run into a lot of scaling
problems?

Java + JSP in a Websphere or JES container, using Struts for the
presentation framework and Oracle or DB2 or Postgres on the backend. 

Ok, that is probably overkill for what the average person plans to
develop, but it would certainly be scalable and well supported, and
marketable. 

Linked from Jellyware 79 to Web 14.

Re #11: I don't expect to run into scaling problems for a while.

I've done some cursory reading up on Rails (and also Django, its Python
counterpart).  Is it correct to say that these frameworks are geared to
using a relational database as the backend data store?  Or are they more
general than that?

I'm also discovering that some web hosting companies support Rails and
others (like my current web host) don't.

Geared toward, but not required.

I really wouldn't use Perl or the Perl DBI when connecting to any kind of
proudction level database. My whole gripe is because Perl OOP paradigm still
lacks the maturity needed to be used in a production level setting. I also
think the whole reference counting garbage collector that Perl uses is a
bigger load of shit than organized religion. Cross, admit it. The perl
garbage collector lags 3 decades behind the lisp garbage collector.

Going off on a tangent, Perl sort used to suck ass because the sorting was
unstable. However, I think as of Perl 5.6, they switched over to mergesort
and hence you can finally get a stable sort. I refuse to comment on perl
hashes.

However, for a personal website or writing hobbyist code, I would use perl
to connect to my database.

I don't care for perl.

Is this because nharmon and vive fagged up your perl experience?

No, because it's a sucky language.

 I don't care for perl either, and agree that it's a "sucky language",
 though I still use it for quick jobs -- usually nothing that I think
 I'm going to have to go back to, because when I'm done the code 
 usually looks like line noise and a month later I find it borderline
 unreadable.

 But #16 is a pretty silly thing to say.  Perl is obviously being used
 in a really whopping number of production environments all around the
 world.  The comments about the garbage collector and OOP paradigm are
 true, but pretty much totally beside the point.  

 I probably should play around with Ruby the next time I have a 
 project..

Perl put a ridiculous number of man pages onto my computer so I removed it.

...

 re #22:  Why not just remove the man pages?

Perl sucks when its used for what it is not good at.
but for small text editing I find perl one liners the best at the job.

I would definitely not write a 1000lines program in perl.

You'd prefer a 10000lines program in C

Most people would be both pleased and astonished to have manpages that give
copious amounts of information.

I have to say, though, the Linux LVM manpages are REALLY good.

Yeah, Perl does spam the manpage space.  Really clutters up manpage
search results to the point of making them unusable.  Shame on them.  I
wouldn't go so far as to remove Perl on that account, though.

Getting back to Ruby vs. Python:  Google searches turn up tons of
discussion, with lots of opinions on both sides but no particular
consensus.  The _RESTful Web Services_ book I'm reading favors Ruby for
its code examples, so that tends to tilt me in the Ruby direction, at
least for now.

Writing 10000 line of C code is about as enjoyable as getting a BJ in a dres,
stocking, and heels.

I thought you were into that kind of thing?

Okay, outside of the really bad typos in thread 29, writing 1000 lines
of threaded code for Linux in C is like wearing cheap stockings. Both are piss
poor imitations to the real thing and both tend to rip apart at the most
inappropriate moments. I really forgot where I was going with this analogy.

I'm also getting the feeling uncle remmer is ignoring me.

And in other news, I finally understand what a fucking tagged union is. Yes,
another winner topic that has taken me 6 months to understand. 

I removed the man pages.  Then I removed the doc pages (html).  Then I noticed
a large unicode directory containing Tibetan.  ANd a Test directory.  And a
whole bunch of other files, maybe thousands of them.  I only needed perl once
to compile one program, and there was a workaround (manual installation?).
If I ever need it again I can use it at grex or reinstall.  The list of files
in perl is 43K (20 printed pages).  80x43=3200 files?  Do I really need
anything not in bin or lib (not even including /lib/perl5/unicode - Bengali,
Cherokee, Bopomofo, Ethiopic, Hangul are all interesting but not relevant to
what I am doing with my computer).
What do other people use perl for?

Mostly, text processing (in various guises).  So it created a lot of files;
were you running out of space or something?

What I'd recommend, if you can borrow use of someone else's machine and
they will let you download and build on it, make either the microperl or
miniperl (depending on your needs and space constraints). You will then
have the relevant exe and can move just it and (I think) one or two .so
files and be done with it.

Thanks for the suggestion about building a smaller perl.
I don't like having a lot of junk on my computer that I do not use.
I process text with pico.  I have perl source code (from Slackware 10).

Please do not develop the bad habits of so many people who write perl
codes. Many perl authors write intentionally opaque codes that use
shortcuts, exploit side effects and massive (unnecessary) indirection.
The arrogance seems to be "well, if I wrote it and I understand it, and
if you cannot understand it to maintain it, I must clearly be smarter
than you". Those fuckers deserve to be sodomized with a rusty hashmap
and force-fed an uncommented library characterized by its gotos into
inner-loops. And then beaten savagely. 

Sounds like you need to learn perl.

It's possible to write decent code in Perl.  All of my Perl code is
*supremely* elegant and readable.  :)

I would have to say the main reason I develop web apps in PHP is because
it is almost universal for web hosts. 

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss