This is not another rant to praise one in spite of the other (an everybody knows I love Ruby, so it would not be impartial), but sometimes people seems to live in another world and do things for the wrong reasons.
I just read
this blog post by Kanwei Li in which he gives 2 or 3 reasons he ditched Ruby in favor of Python. First of all, both are great languages and, although I favor Ruby, I use Python for some projects and they are not all that different. Of course, everyone is free to choose which language one favors, but Kanwei seems to be ditching Ruby out of not knowing much about it, or out of preferring one style over the other
His first reason is that in Python white spaces matter. I used to think this is just a matter of style, but every now and then mandatory alignment hurts me (just try to put together a code generator and you ll notice it). Although my code is always correctly aligned, I like that it s done so because I want it that way, and not because some language demands it. Rants and more rants have been written about Python s mandatory alignment (or other languages lack of it), and I am not going through all of it Just I don t think it s a good reason to ditch Ruby
After, he makes a big deal out of Ruby s
ternary if. As written by him, he prefers
#python
if len(a) > 0:
v = a[0]
a = a[1:]
else:
v = None
over Ruby s
ternary if
#ruby
v = a.empty? ? a.shift : nil
Hey! Come on Ruby s
ternary if is not mandatory It was copied from C just as a syntax sugar. You can do without it, just as in Python:
#ruby
if ! a.empty?
v = a.shift
else
v = nil
end
Better yet! you can use if s return as v value:
#ruby
v = if ! a.empty?
a.shift
else
nil
end
How beautiful is that!
Python lacked
ternary if for a long time, and when it finally acquired one via
PEP 308 its syntax was made different from every other language! Although I don t think that is a problem, some people might think it would be better not reinventing the wheel.
Next, Kanwei goes over a famous problem of Ruby: the lack of a sum method for Array. I admit it s strange, but that is completely coherent: Ruby s Arrays are ordered collection of objects and not mathematical arrays. How do you sum objects that are not numbers? Many different people will have many different answers to that, so Ruby leaves this decision for the programmer and provides basic methods to deal with collections of anything (that can be used to apply sum to numbers, if wished). So, in Ruby you have to use Array#inject to perform a sum:
[1,2,3].inject(0) sum, value sum + value
Array#inject (actually Enumerable#inject) was borrowed from Smalltalk and allows you to loop through an array, building up an accumulator value as you go. When it s done, the final value of this accumulator is returned. Very useful for combining array elements, whether by summing them, building up a pretty display string, whatever. In the example above, I am initializing the accumulator with 0.
If you use Array to mathematical operations and you want your arrays to work that way, you can always add a sum method to Array class:
class Array
def sum
self.inject(0) sum, value sum + value
end
end
Maybe it would be better if you just use Arrays as containers (as it was intended to) and implement that sum inside your own class I completely agree with
Reg Braithwaite here.
Kanwei also mention Python is faster than Ruby. That is true, but was more true some time ago. First of all, Python is older and has had more time to improve its speed. Ruby,
ITOH, just now acquired a good VM and improvements to it finally can run parallel to improvements in the language itself, so I am expecting this to be
less true every release. Python is already not getting much faster between releases, unlike Ruby (the differences between 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 are really impressive!).
IMHO this is not a good reason to choose one instead of the other: if you really need speed, go for C :-)
Now this is something I find interesting Kanwei has mentioned: Python is more production ready . He argues that Google is using it, so it must be good. Well I cannot argue against that: Google is really using Python. But
IBM, Oracle, EA, Cisco, Siemens, etc are using Ruby so that is just a matter of preferring one or another company. Both are production ready I agree, though, that Ruby 1.9.1 has many differences from 1.8.7, and that that may be seen as some inconsistency, but Python also has changed a lot since its 2.0 version, for that matter. And the changes to Ruby brought many benefits I think they worth it.
At last, Kanwei compares Python and Ruby docstrings. Here I also have to agree with him: Ruby docstrings sucks. Actually that s why everybody uses rdoc instead (and that is much more powerful than Python s docstrings). Again, I don t think that is reason enough to ditch Ruby (actually, the existence of rdoc, rubygems & friends should bring people to Ruby instead), but that is a matter of personal taste.
Surely, Kanwei s reasons were easy to argue against. There are areas were Python shines much more than Ruby (and vice-versa), but those Kanwei mentioned are not among them.
I think both languages are powerful enough, and both are way better than Perl or
PHP, so either one you choose would be fine. Better if you don t have to choose and use both ;). If you have to,
ITOH, pay more attention on how you feel while coding in each one, and not to some cheap reasons such as above. If you are a programmer, what matters most is that you ll spend a lot of time coding with any given language let that be something pleasant then.
Martin rants about the German electoral system. From his rant, I'll pick up only two points And I'll try to connect with Toxicore's excelent (Spanish) blog post, where he quotes political analist Denise Dresser.
Dresser has made a great point: Our probably-imposed, legitimacy-impaired president Felipe Calder n has requested the society to talk good about Mexico, to project a positive image of the country. Dresser says, yes, there is a lot of good to talk about the country, and we should emphasize on its richness and beauty, invite people to come and visit, to know what the country is really like. But at the same time, it is our duty to talk bad about the bad areas and decisions of our government, as that is the best (if not the only) thing many of us can do to really get things to happen That is what we can do to push our country's good things forward, to make the country sustainable, to pull attention towards what needs (such as the very very deplorable cases of censorship, human rights violation, ecosystem predation we have seen in the last years).
Anyway... What did I want to comment about Martin's post? He criticizes Germany's law requiring a 5% quota for a party to have parliamentary representation.
In Mexico, the minimum is 2%. Most people agree, though, that it is too low, and that we should push to increase it. Why? Because the money that is spent in supporting the party system. In Mexico, when a political party fails to get 2% of the vote, it is basically disbanded and it is very hard for it to regroup, to compete again.
Many people believe we should aim to a political system with as few political parties as possible (such as the semi-democratic system they have in the USA). I strongly prefer the system found in most European (and even many South American) countries where there is a real wealth of ideological positions represented, and where governments have to be formed by agreeing to form coalitions, as it is almost impossible for them to get full majority.
I would much rather see Mexico march towards a parliamentary-based political system, away from the presidential one. Of course, that is almost impossible to expect.
With the current political system, we are bound to have forever few monolithic, meaningless political parties. We will likely converge on three blocks, following the current three major blocks (leftoid PRD, centroid PRI, rightoid PAN). They are different in some important senses, yes, but in general they are much the same. I don't hold any hopes to ever see something like the Pirate Party appearing in our system...
I ve been back from KDE (4.2!) to Gnome and with the mighty powers of Compiz my desktop is the envy of my Windows coworkers and still geeky functional. Well, somehow functional. For a while I wondered why I can t properly use VNC to remote-control my desktop from home. The connection works and I see the desktop but nothing seems to happen when I click or type. Now I figured out the desktop in the VNC client window is just not refreshed while my mouse and keyboard actions really do what they were supposed to on the VNC server. This is my sad tale of how I learned that a regression may mean driving the motorcycle to work in the middle of the night after cursing VNC. 
After a little searching through the lazyweb I found out that it s a 
[Sorry to my sponsorees who's package sponsoring requests were delayed again due to this mess.]
This coming Sunday, Germany is voting its parliament for the
next four years. I wanted to participate remotely, but they didn t
let me. The letter, inviting me to order the voting forms, was sent
too late. Instead of ordering and waiting for the voting forms,
hoping for them to arrive back in Germany before the municipal
agency stops all their work at 16:59 on Friday afternoon, I filled
in the fields in a way to give my mother full authority to submit
my vote. On the document, it only said that she would need a notary
procuration, which she has.
When my mother tried to vote in my name, they refused her: the
vote has to be confidential, and proxies may only vote for disabled
people, or those who cannot read. I can understand half of the
motivation behind this it guards against abuse but the bottom
line is that I am now unable to cast a vote. Democracy stabbed by
bureaucracy.
Well, democracy to the limited degree that we have it in
Germany. I do not mean to criticise at this time that voting in
Germany means to place trust into people you d rather not trust,
but once they get majority, they can do whatever they want for four
years. The specific shortcoming in our democracy on which I would
like to focus is the five percent clause , which states that a
party needs to reach 5% of votes before they can enter the
parliament; if those 5% are not reached, all votes for the party
are basically lost.
I suspect that this clause is what s keeping back a lot of
people from electing Germany s 
I was one of the participants invited to the FSF's Women in Free
Software mini-summit which happened on the same day as Software Freedom
Day this year. That was this past Saturday, September 19th.
I was feeling hesitant going in, given the controversy over "why would
the FSF run a closed event about such an important topic" and just
a general burnt out feeling about the subject on my part. Honestly, I've
tended to avoid being much of a feminist in the past and simply hope
that people will stop bickering and leave me to my code, especially in
the aftermath following well-publicised incidents. This is despite the
fact that the thing that got me involved with free software originally
was 
After almost two years, I just made a small update to the
In my haste to fix 
So there's three systems. One of them runs CentOS 4, the other two
run RedHat EL 4. One of the RedHats has been in use for quite a while,
but the other two are freshly installed, and would need to have the same
functionality as the first, but don't yet, mainly because they miss a
number of packages.
So we do this.
Since all the cool kids are doing it, here are some of the more interesting
stats from the Google analysis tools. The third most popular search term
used to hit my site has been '