"Richard Conroy" <richard.conroy / gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:511fa3a20711280513m702a8b1ft2f0ee7f1130ee1be / mail.gmail.com...
> On Nov 28, 2007 12:30 PM, Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality
> <ihatespam / hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Warning:  I don't really know what I'm talking about so if I make any
>> mistakes in terminology, please try to correct me...
>>
>>
>>     I've been doing a lot of Python programming and I've discovered that
>> it's actually a very powerful language.  The language, itself, lacks any
>> kind of elegance but it has all the power of Ruby and a little more
>> performance.  It also has a richer set of libraries, although not in all
>> areas, surprisingly.
>>     One thing that Ruby should take from Python are continuations.
>
> Ruby has continuations. Though in practice they are not used much.
> They have caused serious pain in implementing JRuby for instance,
> to the point that IIRC JRuby does not support them out of the box (and
> this doesn't diminish JRuby's value really).
>
> But there are a lot of really smart people looking into Ruby right now.
> Don't expect the dormant Lisp-like features to stay unused.
>
> Python 'lacks any kind of elegance'? Thats unfair. It is more correct to
> say, that Python has a different value system for code expressiveness.

    Indeed, I wasn't trying to be fair, I was just expressing a personal 
preference.  While Python is clearly a powerful and useful language (I'm 
programming in it, aren't I?), its syntax choices irk me to no end.  len() 
is a function that can take a list but .append() is a method of list's? 
Arg!  Zero and empty strings evaluate to false?  Arg!  Both zip() and 
dict.items() are built-in but izip() hides in the itertools module while 
dict.itertimes() gets to be built-in?  Arg!  Considering how iterators are 
more useful than actual lists, double arg!
    As it so happened, I did expand on some of the differences between 
Python's code values and mine, later on in my post...


> Python and Ruby are more or less peers on the Language Power Continuum.
> Choice between either will depend more on specific task details, specific
> library availability or personal preference.

    Of course.  I'm programming in Python, aren't I?