How's ruby compare to it older brother python

[Phil Tomson]

In article <108pvmgl0h7m3ea at news.supernews.com>,
John Roth <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote:
>
>"Hunn E. Balsiche" <hunnebal at yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:c6ich0$c5mee$1 at ID-205437.news.uni-berlin.de...
>> in term of its OO features, syntax consistencies, ease of use, and their
>> development progress. I have not use python but heard about it quite
>often;
>> and ruby, is it mature enough to be use for developing serious
>application,
>> e.g web application as it has not many features in it yet.
>
>As another poster has mentioned, Ruby is more closely related
>to Perl than to Python. While I don't use it, people I respect who
>have moved to Ruby say it has a couple of real killer features;
>in particular the way blocks and the pervasive use of the visitor
>pattern come together change the way one writes programs for
>the better.
>
>As far as syntax is concerned, there doesn't seem to be a
>huge amount of difference. Syntax is syntax, and every language
>has it's little pecularities.

Well, there is one big difference syntactically: Python uses indentation 
as syntax and Ruby doesn't.  Personally I don't prefer Python's 
'indentation-as-syntax' since it means that syntactically significant 
pieces of my code are invisible and if the tab settings in my editor are 
not the same as yours it can make it difficult to share code (or even 
worse, it might look like everything is OK when we share code, but the 
code which looks exactly the same to each of us, might not be depending 
on how tabs are or are not expanded). It would also seem to be a pain for 
cutting & pasting code as well.
However, some people really like Python's indentation-as-syntax, so YMMV.  

Your best bet is to actually use each language for a small project 
so that you spend about a day with each language.  You'll find that while 
on the surface both languages seem quite similar, at a deeper level they 
each have a very different effect on how you think about and approach the 
problem.  Some people find that Ruby best fits with their brain and others find 
Python a better fit.  You won't know until you try.

Phil