[Tutor] Help deciding between python and ruby

[Dirk Wangsadirdja]

Hi,

I've never learned ruby, but from what I read, ruby is a pure OOP 
language, and if you are going to do a lot of web creation, then ruby on 
rails is a good one.

What I can advice is, if you choose to stick with python, perhaps you 
shouldn't use python 3.x, but use python 2.5 (from what I heard, its 
supposed to be the best version?).

Why? many python packages that later on I'm sure you would like to use 
are still based on python 2.x.

I didnt know it before, and I start by learning python 3.1. Since I 
start with that (and because I'm too stubborn), I don't want to start 
learning python 2.x. But thats my choice, and if there are packages that 
I cant use yet, I just have to live with that.

Besides that, I think that most of the python tutorials are still based 
on python 2.x.

In case you're not aware of it, python 3.x is not backward compatible. 
And since there are several changes in python 3.x, it wouldnt be able to 
run python 2.x script.

And if you're planning to make executeable files from your script, as 
far that I know, until now there are no tools to convert python 3.x 
script to executeable yet.


> On Fri, 2009-09-04 at 06:18 -0700, dan06 wrote:
>> I'd like to learn a programming language - and I need help deciding between
>> python and ruby. I'm interesting in learning what are the difference, both
>> objective and subjective, between the two languages. I know this is a python
>> mailing list, so knowledge/experience with ruby may be limited - in which
>> case I'd still be interested in learning why members of this mailing list
>> chose python over (or in addition to) any other programming language. I look
>> forward to the feedback/insight.