Nonsense

License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0. Copyright, Why The Lucky Stiff.

This month's "Troll of the Month" is Ruby vs Python - why no-one should care by Cynos. Cynos touches on a point I've seen raised a few times in the past month.. namely that Python and Ruby are similar and are, supposedly, 'converging'. He argues, therefore, that both communities should stop evangelizing to each other. Despite a reasonable, if baited, argument, however, the comments quickly turn into a pointless flamewar:

I want to look at the history of the BASIC language, the uptake of novice programmers, and how Ruby could capitalize on them in the future.

Today I read JesusPhreak's "Of snakes and rubies; Or why I chose Python over Ruby" and it highlighted a few of the feelings that have been running around in my head lately regarding Ruby. He points out Python's wealth and depth of libraries, style guides, and how Python is wider used and less dependent on a single technology to promote it. While Rails is good, he seems to feel that Rails is defining the entire Ruby experience too much. I'm inclined to, sadly, agree.

For the fun of it, I developed a quick Ruby obfuscation tool a few weeks ago. It's not a proper obfuscater that changes variable names and such, but it'll keep your code from being immediately understood. Here's the library, px.rb: