Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News)

Well, I prefer Python.  So don't be surprised that the random thoughts I throw out here favor
it.  But I've used both. 

They are both dynamically typed languages and have much similarity with each other.  In the
Python culture being "explicit" is strongly preferred.  Ruby fans tend to like some
implicitness.  Ruby looks a bit more like Perl.  There are tons more libaries and support for
things like dbus, beagle, tracker, etc. for python. (Just do a "yum list" or whatever and grep
for ruby and python.  There *is* no comparison. (I find this to be a significant point in my
work.)  If you are doing web development, Rails is more popular than all the Python based
frameworks put together.  But in my opinion, Django toasts Rails for quality and good design.
Outside of web development, python is used a lot more and Python programmers are in a lot
greater demand.  Python runs circles around Ruby for speed.  But neither is a race horse.
Sometimes, the speed of the language is important, and sometimes not.  Ruby has a JVM based
runtime "on the way", but it's been "on the way" for years, and last I tried it, the
performance didn't seem that great.  With python, you have Iron Python (which is quite fast, I
hear) for .Net integrategration.  And Jython, which gives you access to the world of java
class libraries, but is always a release or two behind CPython.

Rails popularity cannot be denied.  (Just go to Amazon and type "Ruby On Rails" in the search
bar.)  But I suspect that if it *weren't* for rails, people would be saying "Ruby?  What's
Ruby?"