I love Python and use it pretty much anywhere I can, especially as it's ubiquitous in scientific computing. Is there a good reason to switch to Ruby except to try something new?
The worst offender (in my opinion of course) is leaving out of empty parentheses on method calls. It makes it impossible to know if something is a property or a function. The argument is that it doesn't matter if it's a property or a function, but I feel like it makes it very difficult to reason about performance. If I know something is a function, I'll look at the function and see what the performance implications are. Where as if something is a property, I assume it's "free" to access. This doesn't hold when reading Ruby code, and I basically have to look up everything all the time.
Just my opinion as someone that had to switch between python/ruby/perl to maintain tools written during different decades.
There are no properties or functions in my view—only messages. object.message sends message to object, which object may or may respond to.
This seems like a form of premature optimization.
I mean, you're not wrong technically, but if you were exceptionally performance concerned, you probably wouldn't be using ruby.
If you're just regular performance concerned (i.e. you want to stop pathological behavior in the hot loop), you're really only concerned about 1-2% of your code. You wait until it's an issue, run a profiler over your code and optimize the couple of parts that are causing the issue.
`attr_accessor` is a macro which defines two methods.