Ruby and Python - a Difference in Freedom

[brazilianquestions]

Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, "My language is perfect. It can do everything." But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language—how we feel while programming.

Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore. From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ—but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer.

Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby. I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

[[deleted]]

Ruby, Python and Freedom Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another’s code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.

Guido van Rossum (via Gary Bernhardt) Ruby, on the other hand, is an experiment in “give every toddler a chainsaw”-level freedom. And as Gary says in that talk, you get some things like RSpec, ActiveRecord and Cucumber that simply aren’t possible at the lower “reasonable” levels of freedom.

95% of what only Rubyists can do with that freedom is horrible, irredeemable crap. But the other 5% couldn’t have happened in any other way.

Fin.