In article mailman.493.1074484056.12720.python-list@python.org,
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I’ve been a long-time Perl programmer, though I’ve not used a boatload
of packages nor much of the tacky OO.A couple of years ago, I decided to look into Python and Ruby. Python
looked OK, but not that different. I did like the indent-as-group idea,
which was different. Ruby looked very cool.
It is very cool.
But it was impossible to
get good documentation.
It’ s not impossible. Check out www.ruby-doc.org, for example.
It seemed like a Japanese cult with a few
western initiates.
You should see us at the Ruby conferences. We must speak only in haiku
until we reach the Master level 
Well, MacOS X ships with Perl, Python, and Ruby (and PHP, and …) so I
recently figured I’d try them again. I still find Ruby more intriguing,
but I’ve settled on Python. Why?
Don’t lose the intrigue.
Well, Perl is an expedient measure that (for me) doesn’t scale up and
has that horrible OO syntax. (So I never used it much.) If you’re going
to read someone else’s Perl, you had better be “in the zone”.A couple of months ago, I’d written a quick Perl script that would
“unstick” a co-worker’s POP email. The problem is the Windows-based POP
server is too stupid to realize a message does not end in CRLF, so it
just appends a period then CRLF thinking it’s doing well. But the
period ends up not being alone on a line, so it’s not a valid
termination to the message. So their email program hangs waiting for a
proper termination. Sigh.A week ago, the script broke because I hadn’t properly accounted for
the fact that the user might have hundreds of messages queued up. (I
hadn’t used a Perl POP package, which might’ve handled it, but just
threw it together myself. Yes, that would’ve made the Perl code more
competitive with the other two solutions.)So I decided this might be a nice exercise to try Python. And it went
together very quickly using Python’s POP3 package. Then I decided to
try it in Ruby. I think one little portion of the code shows the
difference between the two cultures.The problem is that the message is not properly terminated, so you need
to time out and catch that timeout to realize, “hmmm, malformed”. In
Python I had:M = poplib.POP3 (‘172.16.30.1’) ;
M.user (‘foo’) ;
M.pass_ (‘bar’)num_mesgs = len (M.list ()[1])
bad_mesgs = 0for msg in range (num_mesgs):
try:
M.retr (msg + 1)
… blah blah…How do I get it to time out after 5 seconds and how do I catch that?
The online docs are pretty good, but I had to guess that POP3 was built
on the socket package. Looking at socket’s docs I found the proper
command and exception. I had to include:socket.setdefaulttimeout (5.0)
before the POP3 commands to set the default socket timeout to 5
seconds. Andexcept socket.timeout:
is the proper way to catch the timeout. Both of these things are in the
socket documentation.Contrast this with Ruby. The Ruby docs are less complete, but they did
mention that POP was subclassed from protocol and you’d have to look at
protocol’s source to see how it works. Looking through protocol, I
figured out what to do and it was more elegant.
Um hmmm…
A quick google for: Net::Protocol Ruby revealed several hits.
Although, I’ll admit, I didn’t find the Net::Protocol class covered in the
Pickaxe book.
The protocol class had a read_timeout, but since Ruby’s mantra might be
said to be “Real OO”, the POP code had been written such that you could
saypop.read_timeout = 5
So what’s the problem?
after the POP open and it set the timeout for that pop connection to 5
seconds. Almost as if POP passed the read_timeout upstream to socket
automatically. (I don’t think Ruby does, but it’s coded to look that
way.)
Did it or didn’t it? You never really say what happened with the Ruby
code.
My experience is limited, but it feels like this example gives a good
feel for the two languages. Python was better documented and things
came together quickly. Ruby ultimately had a more elegant solution, but
was more poorly documented. This echoes the mantras: Python’s is
“Batteries Included”, while Ruby’s might be “Real OO”.
Ok, so you basically had to read the code and then you got it working, or
no?
On a personal note, I usually prefer an elegant solution, but when the
language goes so far as to consider0.step(360, 45)
to be reasonable, my head hurts. I know there’s syntactic sugar so I
don’t have to code like that. I know everything’s an object. But,
dammit, a constant integer is an integer with constant value and
causing it to iterate is a step too far.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I remember that one of
the first things I saw about Ruby was that even interger literals were
objects that can receive messages and thinking how wonderful that was.
As you say, you’re not forced to do things this way - you can use ‘for’
for example, but:
10.times do something end
is somehow so clear. It’s almost zenlike.
Phil
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Wayne Folta wfolta@netmail.to wrote: