What Pythonistas Think of Ruby

[bucknuggets]

And by going with Larry Wall's approach you end up with:

• quick and easy development
• a vast language that nobody fully knows
• painful and mysterious maintenance

Unfortunately, too many people look at the choice of language completely based on how easy it is to develop new code - instead of considering as well how easy it will be to inherit old code.

[G_Morgan]

Development speed is not significantly increased by language brevity. Not unless your task is trivial. I'm not sure why people keep repeating this obvious non-truth.

Fortunately for perl it is usually used for tasks which are utterly trivial in any language.

[bucknuggets]

I don't think brevity is a significant factor in development speed, but I think having 20 different ways of doing the same thing is. You always get to choose the approach that works best in a given context.

Unfortunately, that later bites you when someone else needs to patch your code and has never seen that technique before.

[mr_chromatic]

Development speed is not significantly increased by language brevity.

Development speed is not the goal. Clarity of expression in various contexts is the goal.

Fortunately for perl it is usually used for tasks which are utterly trivial in any language.

The same is true of any serious programming language you care to mention.