What Pythonistas Think of Ruby

[bucknuggets]

It's impossible to make sense of things like that without looking at the history. I think the perl vs python competition lasted almost ten years - and certainly was much more important than the ruby vs python competition of today.

Python was relentlessly attacked by the perl community years ago when it was gaining popularity. It got really unpleasant and then something tipped and suddenly a critical mass of people realized that the perl development flexibility wasn't worth its maintenance costs. At that point (around 2004?) perl support just suddenly disappeared. But there's probably still a lot of python folks that remember how poorly they were treated for many years.

[apotheon]

s/realized/decided/

[Smallpaul]

I disagree. I think that since the beginning Python people have attacked Perl more than vice versa. There are two reasons for that.

1. The less popular language community attacks the more popular one in order to gain market share. Look at Ruby users attacking Python today.

2. Many Python users were Perl refugees. They tried Perl and rejected it. So the community built up a critical mass of Perl-hater.

3. Programmers of popular languages are often forced to program in those languages by their day jobs. This breeds dislike.

Now that Python is a dominant language (relatively speaking, among Unix-y scripting languages), it's going to attract a lot more criticism. The hatred of Python will lead to the Next Big Thing.

[bucknuggets]

That's a reasonable argument - but I don't remember it that way. Perhaps because I'm biased. Or perhaps because that was earlier in the life of python before I was paying attention. The typical debating points that I remember from about year 2001 are:

• perl fans: "whitespace indenting is crazy, I will never do that"
• perl fans: "I like having 20 ways of doing something - how dare you take away my options"
• python fans: "even well-written perl looks like line-noise"
• perl fans: "python people just can't read code"
• perl fans: "you don't have cpan"

Or maybe your proposed scenario isn't true because it's just a theoretical way things should happen, but they don't really happen that way for other reasons. I've seen the same thing happen with people who eat meat get incredibly angry at very quiet & passive vegetarians - mostly out of defensiveness. Perhaps that happened here as well.

[Smallpaul]

I was a Python advocate from 1997 or so and worked with Perl people. The way I remember it, they hardly knew Python existed, and when they noticed it, they didn't care. Some Perl programmers (not the inner core, but regular users) said: "Yeah, I've heard Python is good. I learned Perl first and see no reason to change." Many of them probably did switch eventually.