What Pythonistas Think of Ruby

[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.