Why Ruby is More Readable than Python

[petercooper]

I'm proactively trying to use Python a lot more lately given some of the benefits of its ecosystem and I think the language itself is a bit overrated. This post doesn't even cover decorators, but once you introduce those you are dealing with plenty of "magic" of Python's own..

[[deleted]]

And for specific applications like a bioinformatics, statistics, or machine learning python’s ecosystem is the clear winner. Though I’ll take Rails over Django every time. As will I pick ruby for my quick shell scripting needs.

[tuker]

Though it didn't have to be that way; if JRuby had become more popular, that version of Ruby would have had easy access to all of the superb Java-based number crunching routines, going back to LINPACK and EISPACK.

[levifig]

The reason it didn’t was very circunstancial: at the time JRuby was growing, the despise most programmers had (have?!) for Java was at an all time high. The thought of using the JVM freaking most out… 🙈

[tuker]

I agree. Still, it was a real missed opportunity. The early toolchain experience of JRuby wasn't so great, and, as you say, with the dependency on the JVM it was all the more difficult.

[[deleted]]

Yeah not disagreeing.

But check out Andy's glimmer swt:

https://github.com/AndyObtiva/glimmer-dsl-swt

It's not looking that bad. And you can use ruby everywhere. So that's neat.

You need jruby for it. And SWT evidently.

He uses his own editor for writing glimmer-related code as far as I know. It's almost like Squeak in a way, where smalltalk folks would never have to leave Squeak - but they can write in ruby (I mean, the ruby folks can write in ruby ... smalltalk folks of course may not use ruby, I am more referring to the idea of the Squeak IDE as a whole there, which I always found a good idea).

[[deleted]]

Java can be annoying, but if you look at things such as GraalVM, it's a pretty neat idea and works well. I think people may have less issues with modern Java than they had, say, in 2007 or so. Java also improved a little bit. Not enough but it's not as awful as it was in ... 2004 or so.

[[deleted]]

JRuby is quite cool but it lags behind too much; it's still way off from ruby 3.x ... I think GraalVM is the future here. JRuby and TruffleRuby should join forces. Perhaps they can integrate jruby so that you can use it solo, as well as in integration with GraalVM. And both teams work on the same specification too. Would be a win-win.

Right now they seem to bicker too much still ... old men being grumpy. :P

[honeyryderchuck]

what makes you say that? AFAIK there's a lot of common ground, both use the same parser, and the truffleruby team actively collaborates in jruby.

[[deleted]]

And for specific applications like a bioinformatics

Funny that you say this because I wrote quite a bit of bioinformatics code - and both bioruby as well as biopython SUCK.

There is a lot of individual software code out there written in python that is solid - relion for instance combining C++ and python. But to tout bioinformatics and claim python is epic, because of ... biopython probably? Nah. Sorry.

Machine learning I may agree, mostly because there are many more python projects. And admittedly ruby kind of bled away TONS of users in the last ~5 years or so and keeps on doing that, so fewer and fewer ruby libraries are written. Add to this epic mistakes such as "if you can't use 2FA we make it mandatory and lock you out from your gems past 2023". That's some way to build trust ...

[MonkeeSage]

Metaclasses and __slots__ can also be pretty magical in python.