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Python vs Ruby

by: Martin Alexanderson Published 22/02 - 2007

I’m working with the technical development of Testfreaks. An early big technical decision will be what technology and programming language to use. We have a lot of Java experience in the team, from PriceRunner and elsewhere, but would like to use a dynamic language for Testfreaks, and have narrowed the field down to two options: Python or Ruby.

Some of our requirements are:

  • ability to maintain high developer productivity
  • good support for internationalization and localization
  • easy recruitment, inside and outside Sweden
  • some parts of the system will need to process large data volumes, so performance is important, as is support for distributed processing and storage
  • of course, a good web framework (Turbogears, Pylons, Django, Ruby on Rails, Nitro)
  • access to high-quality, third-party libraries
  • development tools, emacs support

We will make the final decision in March, and will evaluate the two languages over the next few weeks.

So, what do you think? What’s your favorite? Any ideas on how we should evaluate them?




Related Posts

  • http://comments.deasil.com/ felix

    Hey, I’m going through a similar process, although I’m looking more at php vs Ruby. I put a post up and there’s some discussion going with a few interesting tidbits on Ruby that might be interesting to you… If you’re curious::

    php vs ruby

  • http://plaincode.com TheNab

    The correct title would be Python vs Rails.

    We do rails – gotta luv it.

  • http://paddy3118.blogspot.com Paddy3118

    The Scientific Python community have two sites/projets/distributions that you might want to look at.

    Enthought have a ‘scientific batteries included’ distribution of Python – It handles large amounts of data and shows what can be done when you integrate Python, C, C and Fortran. https://svn.enthought.com/enthought .
    Biopython also has to deal with large amounts of data http://biopython.org/wiki/Main_Page .

    Comp.lang.python is a great community for upport.

    - Paddy.

  • http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/index.shtml Fuzzyman

    Python and Ruby are very similar. Both have excellent testing tools and web framework(s).

    Rails has better integration with AJAX support, but the MochiKit AJAX toolkit that is used with the Python framework Turbogears is widely regarded as being cleaner to use than Scriptaculous.

    Python has a more intuitive, easier to read, syntax – but both languages have much to reccommend them.

  • python newbie

    Thanks for the info. Python is better than Rails in many ways, at least most of the projects here have been reverted to Python from Rails.