It might depend on your previous history. My development arc was C, Perl, Java, Ruby, Python with Javascript in parallel. Python is not particularly intuitive after 10 years of Ruby. Actually it's a mistery to me how people can like such a complicated language. However I got only customers using Python last year so I must make me like it at least a little. I keep thinking I could have been very unlucky and found some Java projects instead.
It's just what you know, coming from the other direction I found Ruby ugly and plenty of warts of its own. But I'm aware this is just a subjective impression and they're broadly very similar.
Yup. I'm with you. For my money, Ruby could fill exactly the space Python does and do it better...but Python has too much steam in its niche and Ruby got pigeon-holed as a web language; such is life.
The python one valued doc, robustness, readability and stability.
The ruby one loved cleverness, beautiful design and conventions.
Eventually they ended up meeting at the middle, but in the mean time, people got tired of :
- having the last monkey patch breaking their code
- having to try to understand the last crazy dsl somebody came up with
- having an incomplete out of data doc and no tests
- having gem install breaks on you randomly
- having to mess with rvm (still an issue though) which never seems to do quite what you want
Ruby is a good language, but it took too much type to come out of it's teen years, playing bold and teasing. Now it's too late.
JS is getting away with it, despite being way inferior to ruby, because it's the only language on the web platform and we are forced to use it. Ruby didn't have this chance.
