Do I not like Ruby anymore? (2024)

Summary

Do I not like Ruby anymore? 2024/05/28I recently started working at a Python shop. The reasons behind this choice of employment are very much unrelated to the technology stack. Python is not my favorite programming language. In fact, allow me to drop the euphemism and express my pure, unadulterated thoughts about it: I never liked Python, I see it as a huge red flag and I think the world would be a better place if we all decided to finally move on from it.With that out of the way, let’s talk about how I’ve recently started to come around to Python and actually kind of like it in some aspects?I (used to) love RubyRuby was my first love as a programmer. It is a playful, concise, elegant, expressive language that is built out of a handful of simple concepts with a good serving of syntax sugar on top.Ruby was clearly designed taking inspiration from such language designer’s languages as Smalltalk and Lisp, and as a budding Schemer with an interest in programming language design, that inspired me a lot.Now, Python and Ruby were the two most popular “scripting” languages at the time. Ruby exploded thanks to Rails, and Python saw a lot of success as a language for data science and a better choice than Perl for command line tools and scripts.The two languages were often compared and contrasted, and of course I, as a fan of Ruby, had a lot of opinions about Python.Python as a worse Ruby (and an even worse Scheme)I kind of lied earlier when I said that Ruby was my first love as a programmer. The first time I started to really grok programming was when I learned a little bit of Scheme. I learned recursion beforefor loops, and I learned immutability before mutability.As I said in the beginning of this post, I didn’t like Python. My dislike for it was best exemplified by its choice to make if a statement rather than an expression. If you want to assign a variable conditionally in Python you have to declare it first, and then mutate it from inside the if statement, and this just ...