[ale] Ruby vs C, a non-technical chat

[leam hall]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Dylan Northrup <ale at doc-x.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 9:44 AM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > That's an important bit of information. Under such circumstances my
> > preference is for Python. I just like the language better (truly, I can't
> > stand the sight of Ruby). As for contrived performance, they're pretty
> much
> > even -- http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/ruby.php
>
> Glad to know you're using objective criteria for your evaluation of
> languages.  I think semantically important white space is one of the
> stupidest ideas to ever be implemented in any scripting language and
> prefer Ruby over Python (having come to it from Perl).  I also like
> flexibility in my approach to solving a problem, something that seems
> antithetical to the Python philosophy where there's One True Way to
> solve every problem.
>

Not sure "stupid" is an objective criteria. From looking at it for a while,
Python has a lot to recommend it as a Linux/Unix tool. I happen to like the
whitespace, even though it took time to get used to. All my code looks
better because of building that habit.

Hmm... can I use gofmt on Ruby code?  ;)

A couple of years ago I came upon some Python code someone had written
> "because they wanted to learn python" and it was in a production
> workflow.  One of the assumptions they had made was no longer true.
> Their tool needed to be updated to account for the changed
> environment.
>

I did that with someone's Perl a few years ago. We were using a task
tracker for weekly mgmt updates and he hadn't considered that using a date
key that ignored year meant all last years work showed up on the report.
Had to go wash my hands after fixing his code.

Leam

-- 
Mind on a Mission <http://leamhall.blogspot.com/>
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