undefined | Better HN

0 pointsCalavar3mo ago0 comments

Because Ruby is just a better thought out language than Python is. It had a sane package management story 15 years before Python. It doesn't rely on weird hacks like exception throwing for iterator control flow. It doesn't have nearly as many warts and footguns on basic operations (for example, in Python csv.writer(file).writerows(rows) is broken unless you remembered to set the newline mode on the file; in Ruby file.write(rows.to_csv) just works). Thanks to a sane VM design it's mainline JIT can actually run code faster than interpreted code (something that CPython's JIT can't do [1])

Many Pythonistas are woefully ignorant of what's going on outside their siloed community.

[1] https://fidget-spinner.github.io/posts/jit-reflections.html

0 comments

lern_too_spel3mo ago

Everything being mutable by default, including strings, is about as big a foot gun as you can find in a high level language.

nirvdrum3mo ago

Having immutable objects by default isn’t incredibly commonplace outside of functional languages. It certainly isn’t unique to Ruby and seems out of place in a discussion comparing Ruby to Python. Fortunately, you can defensively freeze any objects you’re passing around to avoid the most common issues with mutable objects.

Immutable strings is a more popular programming language feature and Ruby has a mechanism for opting into that. It’s so commonplace that the complaint usually isn’t that a string can be modified, but rather that every source file includes a magic comment to prevent that. Besides data safety, the VM can optimize frozen strings, so popular linters will flip that setting on for you. String mutability isn’t a practical issue for modern codebases. And, as language design goes, it’s kinda nice not needing to use a parallel set of classes for mutable and immutable string data IMHO.

With that said, the magic comment is a wart and folks are looking at making immutable strings the default. But, there’s a strong desire to avoid breaking the world. The Ruby Core team is keen to keep the lessons learned from the Python 2 -> 3 migration in mind.

lern_too_spel2mo ago

> With that said, the magic comment is a wart

Not only a wart but a massive foot gun, not shared by any other language, as I said. It is incredibly common to create hash tables using strings as keys, and Ruby makes this dangerous by default.

> Having immutable objects by default isn’t incredibly commonplace outside of functional languages

They make it easy to create immutable objects. Python has tuples and immutable data classes. Strings are immutable.

> The Ruby Core team is keen to keep the lessons learned from the Python 2 -> 3 migration in mind.

In the meantime, this ridiculous foot gun that no other language shares exists. That is a fact, and the fix being hard does not make it any less of a fact.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse