Comments on: A year with Python

By: markus

markus — Sat, 16 May 2009 23:04:33 +0000

> I’m glad to see someone ditching overhyped Ruby in favor of Python.

The thing which makes me mad – and I am using ruby since 5 years – is when people talk that Ruby is overhyped, but they mean Rails.

Seriously – the ruby community never hyped ruby. Ruby as a language is great.

But once rails emerged, that whole field changed. It would be nice if people could FUCKING separate between the two. No, the communities DO NOT largely overlap. I know a great deal more ruby developers who DO NOT USE rails. At the same time, many DO USE rails.

Oh well…

Anyway, back to the point. Moving from perl away is always a good thing.

It is called evolution. Whether this be python or ruby is not so important, but it would be interesting if you one day would move from python to ruby too AND blog about it (no matter the end result).

PS: But please, core ruby. Use rails only _after_ you spent enough time with ruby. So many people use rails but have no appreciation or understanding for ruby itself… and seriously, if I look at code like Activerecord, it makes me sick….

By: eliben

eliben — Sat, 16 May 2009 14:00:52 +0000

Brian You can always use the CParser object. Its parse function just takes a string and returns the AST. The parse_file function in __init__ is just an auxiliary for common tasks.

By: ryan

ryan — Sat, 16 May 2009 08:10:33 +0000

I have been doing Python 2 years and feel the same way. It is almost the perfect ecosystem and culture for a programming language. I believe it is the next large market standard language.

Ruby is great as well but I find Python has broader uses at least right now (plus I like Python syntax better what little differences their are mainly not having to put ‘end’). Python works great for web, gamedev, desktop, services, servers, parsers, pipeline enhangements, system admin and wraps just about every difficult library (take PyRakNet for view for reliable UDP as one). Another example is Jython, Boo and IronPython, all really productive and keeping CPython honest. If Google finishes the port to LLVM we could see Python being as fast as C, it is already three times faster than Ruby, PHP even without psyco. With psyco it is about 2-3 times slower than gcc.

I think it will be huge and having the backing of MIT, Google, and almost all really smart engineers, it won’t be long now.

By: Brian Smith

Brian Smith — Sat, 16 May 2009 06:42:40 +0000

I had to write a simple script to parse and evaluate a c enum, and your pycparser was super useful and easy to use. If you’re ever in that code again, you should consider making the parse function take a file-like object in addition to the filename (I needed to do my own preprocessing on the file before I sent it to the parse function). Either way though, great work.

By: eliben

eliben — Sat, 16 May 2009 05:13:25 +0000

@Vagif Verdi
Ruby isn’t a bad language. It has some definite pluses over Python, but overall, IMHO, it loses. The strongest points in favor of Python over Ruby are: performance (Python’s much faster), less magic (Ruby’s monkey-patching), and much larger ecosystem (at least English speaking… Ruby is a hit in Japan) – more libraries, more forums/discussions, easier to get help and find code examples.

Imran Khan
There are a few Excel-writing Python libs online. I’m pretty sure you can easily find something no less powerful than your Perl library.
And Moose is a hack, duct-taped on top of Perl. Few use it, few are familiar with it. Compare it to Python’s built-in object system, which is used universally and compatibly, including in all of Python’s standard library.

By: Leonidas

Leonidas — Sat, 16 May 2009 05:06:13 +0000

@Imran Khan- Codes are not written for the managers. Someone has to read your code somehow for maintaining. If you just believe in making things working is your job then that’s the wrong approach towards programming.
I personally always believe in this famous quote by Rick Osborne.

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”

By: Imran Khan

Imran Khan — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:02:13 +0000

When I started reading about Moose I was glad that I didn’t spend much time on Python. I know Python neat and easy to read and manage but I hope Perl 6 will change this.
Neatness of a language will serve me no good If I can’t find a decent module to write reports in Excel. My manager will not look at the neat code, he need the report and there are deadlines.

By: John Mair

John Mair — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:57:26 +0000

@vagif: Python and Ruby are both great languages, you don’t need to bash one to like the other, it’s a matter of personal preference. Get over it.

By: Grant Rettke

Grant Rettke — Fri, 15 May 2009 20:40:27 +0000

Thanks for sharing that. You could have summed up your post very quickly if you had simply titled it “I love Python because it has tons of great libraries!” .

By: David

David — Fri, 15 May 2009 20:38:22 +0000

I’m in the process of starting my Python journey.

I’ve tried out Ruby/Rails. I like the language – lots of syntactic sugar. But, there seems to be a lot of places that could use some maturing. (I’m not trying to dump on Ruby here)

I’m hoping that python is more dependable and as fun to programming in. A lot of people that I respect love python, so I’ll give it a serious try.