Python has a Cheese Shop full of Eggs. I love straightforward names as much as anyone, but I don't think Python is exactly the leader in this department, either.
Re:Happy Birthday, Ruby
by Buttons840 on Thursday January 10, 2019 @12:33PM
(#18875863)
I did a Google search for "hacker news ruby" and "hacker news python" and then searched the top results for "gem" or "egg" or "wheel" usage. It's not a big study, but it is empirical.
Comments about Ruby say:
- "the webpacker gem"
- "Simple to integrate gems"
- "supported via gems"
- "few dozen obscure gems"
- "the I18n gem"
- "the ruby-each-line gem"
- "vast amount of Ruby gems available"
- "working with so many gems"
- "packaged either as a Wheel or an Egg"
- "The numpy module is a wheel"
- "a wheel is specifically not a source distribution"
- "NumPy publishes a lot of wheels for a given release"
Re:Happy Birthday, Ruby
by marcosdumay on Thursday January 10, 2019 @03:09PM
(#18877576)
Python's libraries come as eggs, wheels or source packages. Ruby has gems.
Rust inherited that characteristic, what is not great. It's not a big problem either, but it's there.
With a similar background I tried both Ruby and Pyhton at about the same time many years ago.
I didn't dislike Ruby, but I found Python much more intuitive, as you did, but I suspect that in great part was because it had a similar syntax and concepts as C++/Java.
It was like programming in C with a much cleaner syntax and writing 1/3 of the code, it really was an epiphany.
Then I found Ruby, and people talked very highly of it. But it had all these "Gems", I couldn't figure out what a Gem was. I didn't know enough. I thought it was like a compiler plugin or something. I thought that just like there were different versions of Java, there were different versions of Ruby called Gems.
Then I found Python, it had "libraries", I knew what a library was, it was something you could download and use in your code. I learned Python and liked it a lot. If Ruby had "libraries" instead of "Gems" I would have learned Ruby instead since I was exposed to it first.