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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could merge the parts of Ruby and Python I like while discarding the parts I don't. Mutable strings by default was a huge mistake in Ruby and so was allowing non-self calls to methods from another method of the same class. Within the class scope, it's great, but it just leads to bugs in the method scope. The things I love most about Ruby over Python is I don't have to memorize as many things. With Python I'm never sure if it is isinstance or is_instance or DefautlDict or default_dict. It's annoying having to constantly lookup things. Oh and how I miss one line if statements and conditional assignment when I'm in Python.

One thing I like about both languages is how nice it is to write tests. The patching and the assertions are great.

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> I wish I could merge the parts of Ruby and Python I

Crystal lang does a bunch of great thing but the poor support on Windows (having to install some Linux subsystem to compile stuff) is a non starter for many companies.

I personnally never liked Python's syntax, or OOP, it feels tacked on. However Python's ecosystem is just too huge to be ignored.

I have the same feeling. Chaining is so much more intuitive in Ruby.

You can write one line if statements in Python. You can also do conditional assignment with the ternary operator.

i.e. if True: a = 1 if True else 0

> a = 1 if True else 0

Why should I need an else statement to use an if statement?

You said you missed two things in Python:

> Oh and how I miss one line if statements and conditional assignment when I'm in Python.

derac provided an example exercising both. To separate them:

One line if statements:

  if predicate: expression

Conditional assignment:

  a = 1 if predicate else 0

The else is to permit the conditional assignment, it's a ternary operation, it is not for the if statement.

Well, sorta. In practice people don't use one line statements and it's considered unpythonic. So much so I forgot it was even possible, so you're right, I was wrong. Black converts it to a multiline statement. Also, the Ruby syntax for them is better because it makes it clear it isn't a mistake.

     launch_nuclear_weapons if at_total_war

Just reads better because it doesn't look like a mistaken if statement.

By conditional assignment, I meant more something like this:

    some_var ||= 45

And I know I can do either:

    some_var = some_var or 45
    some_var = some_var if some_var else 45

But it just looks stupid and it is such a frequent need due to the way default args work for things like dicts, that it gets annoying.

check out defaultdict :D

https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.html

What is your issue with mutable strings? I've been a heavy Ruby user for 16 years and have never really thought about strings being mutable... what negative effect does it have?

It allows for certain classes of exploit and is not worth the cost for the negligible performance gain in 99.99% of the situations. Before there was a comment to disable them I would see codebases littered with .dup or .freeze.

> Mutable strings by default was a huge mistake in Ruby

This was changed in 3.0. String literals are now frozen/immutable by default.

I don't believe this is correct.

There was a plan to do that at some point, but it was pulled back from for backwards compat reasons.

You can opt-in to string literals being frozen by default on a per-source-file basis with a magic pragma comment, and this has existed for several ruby 2.x versions and is unchanged in the released ruby 3.0.

Oh, huh. Yeah, you're right. Really showed my whole still-on-2.7 ass here haha

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