Advantages/disadvantages of Python and Ruby

Answer 1

I'm more of a Python than a Ruby programmer but it boils down to the following points.

• Personal preference (programming style etc.)
• Problem you're trying to solve (availability of libraries etc. is important here).
• Integration with existing code bases.

That being said, I have a few reasons that are technical because of which I use Python over Ruby. These are personal opinions and not unbiased.

• Ruby was an underdog till Rails came along. And from what I hear, Rails isn't all that hot. The language grew because of a killer app rather than it's own virtues. The rails community is from what I've seen quite abrasive.
• The Ruby Standard library documentation is much poorer than the Python one.
• Till recently, the Ruby interpreter (MRI) didn't have byte compilation and was quite slow.
• Python's emphasis on readability rather than "clever programming tricks" makes for clean code which is easily understood (very little magic - I say this after a couple of years of bad perl).
• I really don't like the @@ etc. sigils to denote things.

Just to balance it off, here are the things I like about Ruby (with my limited exposure).

• The whole yield coroutine thing. It's there in Python as well but not as deeply as it is in Ruby.
• The metaprogramming.
• The emphasis on tools and processes in the community (although it does sometimes become overkill).

Answer 2

Python is more like Java - it's a bit more verbose, but it drives you towards a better design.

Ruby is more like perl - it's a little complicated, and sometimes it's almost magic, but you can make it do some very cool stuff if you know how. Built in regexps are cool.

Answer 3

I like Ruby because of the way it handles blocks of code. Let me show you an example:

def time_it(meta_data, &block)
  now = DateTime.now
  yield(block)
  later = DateTime.now
  @results << {:meta_data => meta_data, :time => ((later - now) * 86400.0).seconds}
end

time_it :function_name => "blah", :some_other_info => {} do
  # put some code in here and find out how long it takes.
end

Sometimes I like to benchmark something (usually just for fun) and so I wrote a function that wraps around some block of code and times how long it takes. In any other language you might have to copy,paste...copy,paste around your code to get it to do the same thing.

missing_methods is also another cool feature of ruby that makes Rails super useful. The idea that you can make SomeModel.find_by_some_column_and_some_other_column(some_column, some_other_column) work magically really blows me away. Everything is an expression (with only a few exceptions to this rule) so it makes programming in ruby a lot more intuitive then some other languages. If you need to add a custom method to a class or even to one instance of that class, you can do that fairly easily with Ruby.

The ActiveRecord design pattern is being implemented in other languages now like C# so a lot of what makes Rails really cool is making other languages appealing again, but since using Ruby, I haven't wanted to go back to those other languages. To me, Ruby means freedom... hopefully that's not too cliché but I wish people interested in programming were introduced to Ruby before they are introduced to C/C++ because I think it would make them better programmers (although learning to manage your memory is a really good thing to know!)

EDIT: Here's another Ruby code example of how it deals with arrays that I thought was pretty kick ass and have never seen in other languages:

a = [1, 2, 3, 4]
b = [3, 4, 5]
a - b
# => [1, 2]
b - a
# => [5]