I've been writing Ruby for almost 9 years now, and I love it. Ruby, for those who don't know it, is an extremely expressive, natural coding language with roots in Perl and Smalltalk. I comment less in Ruby than any other language I've ever used, because the code tends to be clear and self-documenting. The community has a great ethos, driven by concepts like TDD/BDD (test or behavior driven development), DRY (don't repeat yourself), YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it), and convention-over-configuration.
I've been writing Python for about 18 months now, and it's an amazingly powerful language, with a huge wealth of libraries and resources. I don't love it. In fact, the more I use it, the less I like it. Doing a project in Django has really spiked that feeling. It's not that Python sucks, per se, I just feel like a lot of the lessons I've learned in the last 35 years of coding, and many of the concepts I've gotten used to as a Rubyist just don't apply, and that makes me grumpy.
This Thursday, February 4th, I'll be presenting for the Bellingham Linux Users Group, where I'll expound further, hopefully amusingly and enlighteningly, on this topic.
Thursday, Feb 4, at 7pm in BTC room CC201.
