[cycomachead]

More productive is really hard to say... But I personally prefer Ruby to Python. For smallish scripts, I really like Ruby's backticks for easily executing shell commands. And I find the metaprogramming support in Ruby great for some tasks. I'm not sure if that's what you're getting at.

But especially with "modern" Python features like f-strings and the walrus operator there's not tons of differences that really stand out as "productivity".

One thing to just remember: Ruby is not just the Ruby on Rails community. Rails is a dominate space, but it's not the only thing out there. At the same time, when it comes to scientific computing, ML, etc. the Python ecosystem is incredibly robust. There's plenty of awesome Ruby tools for these things too, but it is not the same.

Ruby and Python are the two languages I primarily teach courses in, and used professionally. Ruby is my cup of tea personally, but they're both modern dynamic interpreted languages.

[ptx]

> For smallish scripts, I really like Ruby's backticks for easily executing shell commands.

Executing external commands is pretty convenient in Python these days, now that we have subprocess.run [1], and passing the command as a list rather than through the shell seems a lot safer.

Doesn't backticks open up the classic command injection issues (i.e. the same kind problem as SQL injection with non-parameterized queries) unless you're extremely careful to manually apply proper quoting in every single case?

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html#subprocess...

[noirbot]

It would, but most of the time when I'm using backticks, it's because I'm writing myself/my team a little helper script that will never get "injected" with anything. Backticks (and the other more featured ways of doing shell commands in ruby) make it really easy to write what amounts to a Bash script, but with a little more features and readability, or pull in some relevant libraries for some more complex task that would be annoying to do in pure Bash.