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Lately, I’ve been hacking around a bit with ruby and I must confess, I’ve started to like it quite much. In particular, there are some things which I like much better than in python. And no, this won’t be all about the enforcing nice syntax.

So here are the things I consider a big win:

• Extendable standard classes There is some nice feature for strings which the ruby developers missed? You can just add it to the String class. No need to derive your special MyStrings, or anything.

• Blocks Okay, it took a while to get used to this, but once you understood how it works, blocks allow you to extend the ruby language by new syntactic constructions (well, mostly loops, but you can also use them for resource management. Just pass out a handle to an object and take care of the proper cleanup afterwards. Ruby’s open can be used like this). Also, I find blocks much cleaner than iterators, since the whole loop logic is encoded at a single place (instead of being split over two or three functions)

• Function calls without parenthesis Again, you can write new functions and really extend the ruby syntax. Paired with introspection, you can write quite powerful class modifiers and call them in a clean, simple syntax. This is heavily used by rails, for example.

Okay, for me the biggest problem with ruby is a lack of a large numeric and matrix library. Python with its

That, and that ruby is reported to be somewhat slower than python. But maybe that changes with the next version which will include a virtual machine… .

Posted by at 2007-09-18 10:39:00 +0200