Ruby Impressions

[Adam Spitz]

Python people,

Thank you for all the responses. I learned a lot about Python just
from reading them. And I'm impressed that there are so many different
ways to accomplish this kind of thing.

But I have to ask you this: would anybody out there actually *use* any
of the mechanisms that you've just created for me? Those of you who
created them: when you were writing them, were you thinking, "Hey,
this is cool! I can use this!" or "This sounds like what the Ruby guy
wants, though *I'd* never use it."?

I have my suspicions.

Maybe I'm wrong, and now that so many people have come up with so many
cool initialization mechanisms, everybody in the Python community will
start using them and everybody will be a little bit happier because
they don't have to write out their __init__ parameter lists in
triplicate anymore.

(For the record, one or two of the responses, especially Neil
Schemenauer's, were actually convenient enough that *I* would be
willing to use them - but my values are different from the average
Python person's, and I'd be interested to see whether the Python
community would ever consider adopting an idiom like that. I really am
impressed, though.)

Anyway, I don't want to dwell on this initialization thing for too
long - it's *really* not that important. The more interesting
question, I think, is, "Why would anybody want to use Ruby if they
already have Python?" I'll try to answer that in a different post.
(Unless someone tells me before then that I should just shut up. :)


Adam Spitz