However, I do not like the general holier-than-thou attitude that much of the community takes and the fact that they seem to spend more time talking about how fucking awesome Ruby is than they spend actually writing code.
This is exactly the position taken on both sides of religious language wars. Don't consider yourself above the fray unless you can get over these emotions.
Because it looks nothing like a standard for loop.
I'm reading: "Because [language feature in A] doesn't look like [language feature in B]." This argument is frequently made by Blub programmers. I can say that I find the first way more intuitive simply because it matches all the other kinds of iterator functions in Ruby. Will you accuse me of immature fanboyism?
There are stupid fanboys and uninformed wannabes in the young Ruby community. Try not to let them influence you as much as they are now. If you want to divide programmers up like that, then try to imagine someone similarly minded on the Ruby side. What they might see in you is a Python guy on a mission against Rubyists. There is plenty of room to interpret your comments as a manifestation of a "holier-than-thou" attitude.
I can come up with just as many silly reasons to hate Python with all of my heart and soul. There have been plenty of times when I have programmed in Python and have stumbled across something I can rant about. So what? I can go rant about it, and then someone will rant back at me, and pretty soon we're having an idiot contest.
Ruby and Python are both stupid, over-hyped, and totally awesome. Their communities are both full of morons, trolls, anti-{Ruby|Python}ists, and really smart and nice people.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't argue about languages. I like to argue about languages. I'm saying that "that doesn't look like a for-loop!" and "I hate Perlisms!" are vacuous, and I'm also saying that being anti-fanboy is no better than being a fanboy.
Think independently and make your own conclusions that are uninfluenced by all the people on the Internet that are wrong.
"Because [language feature in A] doesn't look like [language feature in B]."
Well, obviously. It's not like I'm arguing that Ruby's syntax is for The Gays because it differs from Python's. I find nothing fundamentally wrong with it, other than the fact that it is not intuitive to me, having seen hundreds of incantations of the for loop. An oft-touted "feature" of Ruby is that it is intuitive; I find it to not be intuitive. This is entirely my opinion.
In the end, a large portion of one's opinion of a language is based off of personal preference. There are undeniable, factual problems with Ruby in terms of performance, community maturity, complexity, language features, etc. There are even more opinion-based, subjective reasons why I feel it is a poor language choice. I make no attempts to justify these reasons beyond making it clear that they are merely my opinions. And I was quite clear on that.
If you can come up with as many silly reasons (some of my reasons aren't silly by any definition, but I digress) to hate Python, then go right ahead. I certainly don't care. I wasn't ranting about it to try to convince anybody of anything; why I like a language isn't important enough to make a soap box out of it. I was asked a question, I answered that question. That's all.
The biggest difference is that tdavis isn't a python zealot. Instead of talking about how awesome python is all the time, he's showing how awesome it is by coding with it.
He didn't force a rant to spark endless political-like debate. Someone politely asked his opinion, which is by definition filled with his own preferences & biases, and he politely gave it.
Comments
However, I do not like the general holier-than-thou attitude that much of the community takes and the fact that they seem to spend more time talking about how fucking awesome Ruby is than they spend actually writing code.
This is exactly the position taken on both sides of religious language wars. Don't consider yourself above the fray unless you can get over these emotions.
Because it looks nothing like a standard for loop.
I'm reading: "Because [language feature in A] doesn't look like [language feature in B]." This argument is frequently made by Blub programmers. I can say that I find the first way more intuitive simply because it matches all the other kinds of iterator functions in Ruby. Will you accuse me of immature fanboyism?
There are stupid fanboys and uninformed wannabes in the young Ruby community. Try not to let them influence you as much as they are now. If you want to divide programmers up like that, then try to imagine someone similarly minded on the Ruby side. What they might see in you is a Python guy on a mission against Rubyists. There is plenty of room to interpret your comments as a manifestation of a "holier-than-thou" attitude.
I can come up with just as many silly reasons to hate Python with all of my heart and soul. There have been plenty of times when I have programmed in Python and have stumbled across something I can rant about. So what? I can go rant about it, and then someone will rant back at me, and pretty soon we're having an idiot contest.
Ruby and Python are both stupid, over-hyped, and totally awesome. Their communities are both full of morons, trolls, anti-{Ruby|Python}ists, and really smart and nice people.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't argue about languages. I like to argue about languages. I'm saying that "that doesn't look like a for-loop!" and "I hate Perlisms!" are vacuous, and I'm also saying that being anti-fanboy is no better than being a fanboy.
Think independently and make your own conclusions that are uninfluenced by all the people on the Internet that are wrong.
"Because [language feature in A] doesn't look like [language feature in B]."
Well, obviously. It's not like I'm arguing that Ruby's syntax is for The Gays because it differs from Python's. I find nothing fundamentally wrong with it, other than the fact that it is not intuitive to me, having seen hundreds of incantations of the for loop. An oft-touted "feature" of Ruby is that it is intuitive; I find it to not be intuitive. This is entirely my opinion.
In the end, a large portion of one's opinion of a language is based off of personal preference. There are undeniable, factual problems with Ruby in terms of performance, community maturity, complexity, language features, etc. There are even more opinion-based, subjective reasons why I feel it is a poor language choice. I make no attempts to justify these reasons beyond making it clear that they are merely my opinions. And I was quite clear on that.
If you can come up with as many silly reasons (some of my reasons aren't silly by any definition, but I digress) to hate Python, then go right ahead. I certainly don't care. I wasn't ranting about it to try to convince anybody of anything; why I like a language isn't important enough to make a soap box out of it. I was asked a question, I answered that question. That's all.
The biggest difference is that tdavis isn't a python zealot. Instead of talking about how awesome python is all the time, he's showing how awesome it is by coding with it.
He didn't force a rant to spark endless political-like debate. Someone politely asked his opinion, which is by definition filled with his own preferences & biases, and he politely gave it.