Python compared to other language

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

walterbyrd a écrit :
> On May 18, 10:24 pm, a... at mac.com (Alex Martelli) wrote:
> 
> 
>>I think that Ruby, which roughly speaking sits somewhere between Python
>>and Perl, is closer to Python than Perl is.
> 
> 
> I don't know much about Ruby, but it does not seem to be commonly used
> for anything other than web-development. It may be that Ruby could be
> used for other purposes, but I don't seem to see it happen much.

Ruby is probably far better than Python at sys-admin tasks. And, while 
recently made much more visible because of the hype around Rails, it's 
definitively not specialized in web development.

> I know that PHP can used at the command line, and could be used for
> the same sort of sys-admin tasks for which, Perl and Python are often
> used, but I don't seem to see that happening either.
> 
> I'm not sure if Ruby, or PHP, are as general purpose as Perl or Python.

Perl is not what I'd call a "general purpose" language. It has been 
explicitly designed as a sys-admin tool. PHP is of course not a general 
purpose language - the only serious reason to use PHP is that it's 
widely available on cheap web-hosting. Python and Ruby are general 
purpose languages - they have been designed to help writing 
applications, whatever the domain and the UI.