What's better about Ruby than Python?

[Michele Simionato]

"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> wrote in message news:<Qfh1b.2654$Ej6.1149 at newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net>...
> For observational evidence of this, I suggest my own
> subfields, computational biology and computational chemisty.
> In the first there are bioperl, biopython, biojava, and bioruby,
> all with active participants and a yearly confererence organized
> by open-bio.org.  But there is only a rudimentary biolisp project
> with minimal code available and just about no community
> involvement.  In the latter, Python takes the lead by far over
> any language other than C/C++/Fortran with commercial support
> for a couple toolkits and several more free ones beyond that.
> There's even a workshop in a couple weeks on the representation
> of biomolecules for Python.  There are also some Java and C++
> toolkits for chemical informatics. And again, there is no Lisp
> involvement.
> 
> I ask you why.  And I assert that it's because Lisp as a
> language does not encourage the sort of code sharing that
> the languages I mentioned above do.  So while it is very
> expressive for a single person, a single person can only
> do so much.
> 
>                     Andrew
>                     dalke at dalkescientific.com

I would say simply that Lisp has a much steeper curve than Python 
& comparable languages. Scientists want to do science, not CS. 
Moreover, they typically don't have very hard programming problems 
(I mean conceptually, not numerically). So, a scripting language is much 
better for somebody who is simply a CS amateur, with a different field 
of research. On the other hand, a CS academics would probably prefer 
Lisp/Scheme over a scripting language, at least I think.

That said, I do agree that the presence of hundreds of dialects works
against the adoption of Lisp. For instance, this stopped me (together
with other factors).

Michele Simionato, Ph. D.
MicheleSimionato at libero.it
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles
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