_why was infinitely pragmatic. He serves as a constant, near daily inspiration to me, just because he programmed because he wanted to, because he loved it, not because it was his career.
In his comments, he says Ruby and Python programmers "battle" a lot. I love and use Python a lot and have a small dislike for Ruby's very irregular syntax, but nothing worth fighting for.
I don't know how long you've been doing Python and Ruby, but when Why wrote that, the relationship between Rubyists and Pythonistas was pretty chilly.
As I saw it: There was this feeling that, after years of being dismissed as a mere scripting language, it was Python's time to shine — but then Ruby came along and (pushed along by Rails) was about to steal Python's thunder, and they were so similar that people thought there was only room for one such language in the New World Order. So Pythonistas began acting pretty rude toward the upstart Rubyists, and the Rubyists got this idea that Python was an evil, enemy technology.
Heh, and I use Ruby a lot and find Python's syntax troublesome :) I do like the idea that we can all unite behind hatred of Java however. Although Groovy at least is a step up and would be my choice if I ever had to program Java under threat of death or dismemberment.
Also I'd highly recommend the movie Python from 2000, starring none other than Wil Wheaton trying to defend the small town of Ruby from an attack by a giant Python.
Freud's Narcissism of small differences 1): the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other.
This theory applies to some other conflicts such as Hells Angels vs. Bandidos, Emacs vs. Vim, Sunni muslims vs. Shia muslims, Christians vs. Protestants etc.
Python's syntax has some irritating holes in it too. Why, for instance, do class methods rely on annotations? Why not take advantage of the explicit self? It's almost like there's a blessed core to Python's syntax that crystalised in about 2000, and nothing since then has been allowed to infringe on it.
I wrote a parser once that translated Ruby code using Python syntax convention into Ruby. It felt like it was basically Python, without explicit self method parameters. But I'm sure everything was horribly un-Pythonic.
This claim is incorrect: Aman Gupta did not create RubyPython, nor does he claim to (and Aman's repo linked above even shows that his repo is a fork of my repo).
Aman has provided some comments, discussion, and code back to RubyPython over the last few days. I know this because I've been chatting with him and pulling his modifications back into the main GitHub repo[1] (which happens to be mine) and pushing them back into the canonical repo on Bitbucket[2] (which is the original creator's repo).
RubyPython was created in 2008 by Zach Raines, rewritten to use FFI in late 2010. Steeve Morin forked it as Rupy (apparently with Zach's blessing as Zach pointed me to it when I posted a bug fix to Zach's code) earlier this year. I got involved shortly after Steeve's fork. After some discussion, we (Steeve, Zach, and I) unforked Rupy back into RubyPython and opened the project a bit wider. I'm currently working on a new release (0.5) that should be out later this week that unifies the two repositories and includes some fixes and enhancements by Aman.
We're using Schacon's wonderful hg-git[3] for navigating between git and hg.
"... any reason as to why this resurfaces from 2008? ..."
A practical reason: Ruby doesn't have the depth of Python libraries, get more done in less time.[0] A theoretical reason: reading through the docs you find that 'decompyle' is based on 'spark' (John Aycock's generic small languages compiler), learning new things about languages & compilers is good. A philosophical reason: studying _whys' code is like finding some lost Greek classic from the library of Alexandria. Worthy of reading, just to see how a hacker works this problem, thus making it timeless.
why the lucky stiff was like the BucketHead (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead) or Daft Punk of programming. I like that - besides the mysterious persona thing - he also reserved the right to follow any tangent; He's a musician as well and made an album for one of his programming books if i'm not mistaken.
If/when I release my programming mixtape - in which i'll spite hot fire about unit testing and my gripes with MVC - he'll definitely get a spot in the liner notes. haha :)
[+] [-] moron4hire|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irfn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netghost|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|15 years ago|reply
But don't get me started on Java... ;-)
[+] [-] chc|15 years ago|reply
As I saw it: There was this feeling that, after years of being dismissed as a mere scripting language, it was Python's time to shine — but then Ruby came along and (pushed along by Rails) was about to steal Python's thunder, and they were so similar that people thought there was only room for one such language in the New World Order. So Pythonistas began acting pretty rude toward the upstart Rubyists, and the Rubyists got this idea that Python was an evil, enemy technology.
[+] [-] chadcf|15 years ago|reply
Also I'd highly recommend the movie Python from 2000, starring none other than Wil Wheaton trying to defend the small town of Ruby from an attack by a giant Python.
[+] [-] amix|15 years ago|reply
This theory applies to some other conflicts such as Hells Angels vs. Bandidos, Emacs vs. Vim, Sunni muslims vs. Shia muslims, Christians vs. Protestants etc.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
[+] [-] regularfry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SlyShy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpodgursky|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phiggy|15 years ago|reply
1: https://github.com/tmm1/rubypython
[+] [-] halostatue|15 years ago|reply
Aman has provided some comments, discussion, and code back to RubyPython over the last few days. I know this because I've been chatting with him and pulling his modifications back into the main GitHub repo[1] (which happens to be mine) and pushing them back into the canonical repo on Bitbucket[2] (which is the original creator's repo).
RubyPython was created in 2008 by Zach Raines, rewritten to use FFI in late 2010. Steeve Morin forked it as Rupy (apparently with Zach's blessing as Zach pointed me to it when I posted a bug fix to Zach's code) earlier this year. I got involved shortly after Steeve's fork. After some discussion, we (Steeve, Zach, and I) unforked Rupy back into RubyPython and opened the project a bit wider. I'm currently working on a new release (0.5) that should be out later this week that unifies the two repositories and includes some fixes and enhancements by Aman.
We're using Schacon's wonderful hg-git[3] for navigating between git and hg.
[1] https://github.com/halostatue/rubypython [2] https://bitbucket.org/raineszm/rubypython/ [3] https://hg-git.github.com/
[+] [-] SlyShy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keyle|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bootload|15 years ago|reply
A practical reason: Ruby doesn't have the depth of Python libraries, get more done in less time.[0] A theoretical reason: reading through the docs you find that 'decompyle' is based on 'spark' (John Aycock's generic small languages compiler), learning new things about languages & compilers is good. A philosophical reason: studying _whys' code is like finding some lost Greek classic from the library of Alexandria. Worthy of reading, just to see how a hacker works this problem, thus making it timeless.
[0] At the time the code was written.
[+] [-] Montagist|15 years ago|reply
If/when I release my programming mixtape - in which i'll spite hot fire about unit testing and my gripes with MVC - he'll definitely get a spot in the liner notes. haha :)