I’m an Apple user now. And I’m attending my second Ruby meeting next week. Crazy days my friends, crazy days.

And the award for best Ruby vs. Python weblog post title goes to… Python up, Ruby down: If that runtime don’t work, then its bound to drizzown.

Matthew Huntbach talks about what’s wrong with Ruby.

Update: Wow.

I have to admit that I only skimmed the article before posting it. Now that I’ve taken the time to read Nate’s comments below, and the actual article… I almost regret posting it.

I’m not sure if Matthew is actively just trying to troll for hits, or if he’s really that confused/shallow in his review. He ranges from downright cheap shots (e.g. his comments re: Why’s Guide) to a very odd complaint about lists. For some reason, in his mind if you have a list of ["apple", "banana", "grape"] and add that to a list of ["pork", "beans", "rice"], the language should perform operations based on pairings of the items… rather than sensibly just yielding a list of all the elements combined.

In the end, he claims to say what’s wrong with Ruby, but mostly he just complains about the free tutorials he came across or that he found the marketing materials for a specific book to be hyperbolic (you don’t say!). The article is, in essence, no more than one complaint about how lists are handled and then a few more complaints that basically come down to personal preference.

A weak article indeed. Blah.

O’Reilly Radar claims PyCon was a hiring fest and makes this comment:

This information is consistent with our analysis of the online book and job markets. Ruby has more momentum among startups, but Python is also a hot startup language, and is becoming one of the officially sanctioned licenses at many larger companies.

Interesting. I wonder if it’s true.

Apparently C is the new assembly… and I think I agree with that.

What is Ruby Quiz?

Ruby Quiz is a weekly programming challenge for Ruby programmers in the spirit of the Perl Quiz of the Week. A new Ruby Quiz is sent to the Ruby Talk mailing list each Friday.

Currently there are 111 programming challenges archived on the site, each one with a detailed problem description and discussions of the possible solutions.

Sure, it’s in Ruby and not Python, but that doesn’t matter. Tonight I took a shot at Quiz #1 which involves working with the Solitaire Cipher (aka Pontifex). Not counting the silly little mistakes I made along the way, it was a pretty straight forward project… and rather fun.

My code works, but it’s far too messy to post (~168 lines). I’ll try to clean it up over the weekend and post it next week.

Benjamin Ferrari compares Python and Ruby, and decides to go with Ruby.

Here’s a short list of reasons to use Django instead of Rails:

Browsing around the wonderful programming.reddit.com last night, I came across a post titled Why Django kicks Ruby on Rails’ collective ass. This is an interesting article, mainly because in a sense it is right, but it goes about explaining Django’s benefits all wrong…

Worth reading if you are trying to compare both frameworks.

Update: The site is really slow right now. You might want to try it later.

IBM DeveloperWorks explains how to build a web spider on Linux:

Web spiders are software agents that traverse the Internet gathering, filtering, and potentially aggregating information for a user. Using common scripting languages and their collection of Web modules, you can easily develop Web spiders. This article shows you how to build spiders and scrapers for Linux® to crawl a Web site and gather information, stock data, in this case.

Ruby and Python are the languages used.

This news is from the other day, but I somehow missed it until just now…

Quoth Jason:

Rails turns 2 and Apple sends over a little birthday gift: Ruby on Rails will be included with Leopard (both server and client). It’s been quite an amazing ride for a little web application framework we extracted from Basecamp (Basecamp was the first Rails app and the reason Rails exists today).

More at the Rails blog.